How Fruit Flies Manage Their Exceptionally Long Sperm

In a story from Nautilus, researchers have documented a remarkable fact about fruit flies: their sperm are extraordinarily long. To put it in perspective, if human sperm were a foot in length, fruit fly sperm would stretch across three football fields. Scientists are investigating how these insects manage the mechanics of producing and deploying such impossibly elongated reproductive cells—a biological puzzle that reveals the diverse and sometimes bewildering solutions evolution has engineered.

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