How Fruit Flies Manage Their Exceptionally Long Sperm
Researchers at the Flatiron Institute used high-speed microscopy and mathematical modeling to study how fruit fly sperm—nearly as long as the fly’s entire body—remain orderly inside a hair-thin seminal vesicle. Rather than tangling, the sperm form wave-like collective flows, propelling themselves by pushing off neighbors moving in the opposite direction. The finding reveals that dense…