Tortuous sperm ‘poison’ your rivals, forcing them to swim in circles until they die

Some sperm the cells are relentless manipulators that will literally poison your competition in the race to fertilize an egg, new research shows.

In a study published on February 4 in the journal PLOS Genetics, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin studied mouse sperm cells under the microscope to better understand the effects of a particular DNA sequence known as t haplotype. The team knew from previous research that sperm carrying this sequence tend to swim straighter (rather than in circles of death) and faster, on average, than competing sperm without it.