When it comes to successful fertilization, turns out that it's not so much about how fast your little swimmers sperm but how long its measures from the bulbous little head to the tip of its tiny swimming tail.



The claim comes from a study set be published in the journal Current Biology, wherein scientists studied the ejaculate traits of fruit flies. At first, they mated different fruit flies with the same female. The flies were genetically modified to produce fluorescent sperm, with one group glowing red and the other glowing green so that researchers could observe as the sperm raced to the egg.

Apparently, speed was not an advantage mainly since all the sperm were heading to the same place and still had to wait around for the egg to be released anyway.  What was interesting was that the slower sperm also tended to be longer, which gave them an advantage when to came to dealing with the faster (and shorter) sperm that had been waiting around for the egg.

Hmm, so slow and steady wins the race? If we didn't know any better, we'd say the findings of this study sounds strikingly similar to a certain Aesop fable.

via The Atlantic