The image is fixed in every health class in America: millions of sperm, each on its own, sprinting for a single egg, and one winner. A new evolutionary analysis suggests that the picture describes some species and badly misrepresents many others.
Biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy, and the University of Szeged in Hungary examined sperm structure across arthropods, the sprawling group that includes insects, spiders, crabs, and centipedes. They found that sperm conjugation, in which two or more sperm physically join and travel as a coordinated unit, is far more widespread than assumed and has evolved independently many times.
