The Bumbling, Crawling Sperms

In the movies, sperms have been portrayed as swimming elegantly up the female reproductive tract to inseminate the egg. What baloney.

The truth is that they're much more like bumbling male drivers who refuse to stop to ask for directions:

When Dr. Petr Denissenko of the University of Warwick first saw sperm cells crashing as they negotiated the tight turns of channels en route to a woman's egg, he couldn't help but chuckle.

"I couldn't resist a laugh the first time I saw sperm cells persistently swerving on tight turns and crashing head-on into the opposite wall of a microchannel," he said. [...]

Despite so many images of sperm swimming like fish, researchers found that sperm rarely swim in the central part of the female reproductive tract. Instead, they avoid the "middle lane" and crawl along the sides of the walls.

Link

See also: Sperm & Egg - Moonlight Panorama at the NeatoShop


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To put that journey into human-scale perspective imagine millions of blindfolded humans swimming uphill through a giant tunnel filled with corn syrup. Hilarity would most definitely ensue.
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