Not long after, he decided to watch his ejaculation, it was definitely not an accident, and he discovered little creatures that were wagging with tails which he called “animalcules”.
As scientists throughout the centuries continued to look from above with their microscopes, there is no doubt what their eyes saw and recorded in the film: sperm swim by moving their tails from side to side.
Why shouldn’t we trust our eyes? So that’s what science has believed since then.
A ‘sperm hoax’
It turns out that our eyes were wrong.
“If you want to see the true tail beat, you have to move with the sperm and rotate with the sperm. It’s almost as if you need to make a really small (camera) and stick it to the head of the sperm,” Gadelha said.
Gadelha’s co-authors, Gabriel Corkidi and Alberto Darszon, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, developed a way of doing it. Using state-of-the-art tools, including a super high-speed camera that can record more than 55,000 frames per second, the researchers were able to see that the side-to-side movement was actually an optical illusion.
In reality, the tail of a sperm lashes only one side.
That one-sided blow should make sperm swim in a perpetual circle, Gadelha said. But no, sperm were smarter than that.
“Human sperm find out if they roll while swimming, just like playful otters corking through water, their one-sided strike would average and they would swim forward,” said Gadelha, a fertility math expert.
“Sperm rotation is a very important thing. It is something that allows sperm to regain symmetry and really be able to go in a straight line,” he said.
Surprising science
The findings were a real surprise, Gadelha said, so the team spent nearly two years repeating the experiment and verifying the math. The results held: just like the Earth it turned out it wasn’t flat, sperm don’t really swim like snakes or eels.
So why does that matter?
“It could be that the rolling motion hides some subtle aspects about the health of this sperm or how well it can travel quickly,” Gadelha said.
“These are very hypothetical questions. What we hope is that more fertility scientists and experts will take an interest and ask, ‘OK, how does this influence infertility?'”
As for what it feels like to reverse more than 300 years of scientific assumption, Gadelha is modest.
“Oh my gosh, I always have a deep feeling that I’m always wrong,” he said.
“Who knows what we will find next? This is a measure given by an instrument that has its limitations. We are right at the moment, but we could be wrong again as science progresses. And I hope it will be a very exciting thing for us to do. ” learn for years to come. “
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