Sometimes you have to go it alone , but when the release gets tough , you should credibly stick around together . That ’s certainly what sperm seem to do , at least ; when swim in in particular thick , elastic liquids , they clump up into little squadrons , but they make a good luck for it on their own if the fluid becomes less elastic .
Viscoelastic fluids , such as melt mozzarella cheese and silly putty , are bothstretchable and gloopy . Within man , cervical mucus – anotherviscoelasticfluid – is the first affair that sperm float through after being “ posit ” within the vagina .
act out how they get together with or compete against each other is key to understand the intricate workings of reproduction . To this last , a team of physicists place different samples of bull sperm – not dissimilar in shape and behavior to those of humans – into a smorgasbord of viscoelastic fluid to examine how they behaved .
As they explained during the recentMarch Meeting of the American Physical Society , they added an pliant polymer to various fluids in parliamentary law to control how viscoelastic they were . And the spermatozoon tended to stick to themselves at scummy viscoelasticities , but herded together at high viscoelasticities .
The viscosity or “ gloopiness ” of the fluid alone did not seem to affect their behavior , although a few crew temporarily formed in clumsy collisions . “ on occasion they might clash and you briefly see a group , but that dissolves reasonably tight , ” Dr. Chih - kuan Tung , an assistant professor of data-based physics at North Carolina ’s A&T State University and the study ’s lead author , toldBBC News .
Sperm swim as a group in a viscoelastic fluid . Tung et al./A&T State University
The team , at present tense , do not know why the fluid has to be both elastic and viscid in ordination for sperm cell to join forces . It could be related to how the fluid flows around their tails , and that swimming conditions might be more optimal in viscoelastic fluid when they ’re swim together .
The sperm cell did n’t quite work like synchronized swimmers , though . “ We observed sperm swim collectively instead of synchronized , ” Tung narrate IFLScience . In any vitrine , if viscoelastic fluid is authoritative to sperm in some direction , it should be take into account duringin vitro fertilizationprocedures , Tung mention .
It may seem unusual that physicists , not life scientist , are studying the movement of sperm , but this all pass under the realm of fluid dynamic – the behavior and machine characteristic of various fluid . Physicists have already unraveled thesecrets behind sneezesand phlegm – yet another viscoelastic fluid – so observing the migration of spermatozoon within various fluid is n’t actually that strange .
spermatozoan swimming in a non - elastic fluid . Tung et al./A&T State University
In fact , the squad even compared the fashion that these sperm cell gather together and spread again with the way molecules bear on the boundary between a natural gas and a liquidity . The clumped - up spermatozoon are like to molecule slue and slipping around each other in a liquid , whereas those make a solo streak are akin to gaseous corpuscle .
So there you have it : like bird of a plume , sperm cell mint together .
