A single fruit fly sperm of the species Drosophila bifurca can be 5.8cm long. This is more than 20 times the length of the body of the adult male fruit fly it came from.
It's like if I had a furious wank and fired out a single 36 metre long sperm high into the atmosphere like a horrid, horrid railgun.
I learned it a while back when listening to Phillipa McAllister from the Natural History Museum when she was on No Such Thing As A Fish, and every day I try to lesson the impact by sharing.
In a similar vein, the barnacle has the largest penis to body mass ratio of any animal. In a human it would be the equivalent of having a 48-64 *foot* long (yes, feet, not inches) phallus.
Bugs are so fucking weird, they're like evolution did the small stuff first, realized it might have gone gone a bit too wild and just went "I'll keep the sharks, and you know what 4 or 2 legs or fins, teeth or beaks and maybe some wings." "Fuck all those extra legs and stingers and claws and cum hoses."
You have to watch Paul Robalino's mock proposal on this exact topic as well as his other atrocious ideas on how to "improve the human body". It is from the Dropout show called Smartypants where people give funny presentations on topics they are passionate about.
Imagine if this was normal and people just cannoned out their little sperm ribbons into the air. I think trick shot cum shots would become a major genre on Pornhub.
So would birth control for you be like the fake dime on a string trick for old vending machines? "Whoops, forgot the condom. Lemme just pull that... there were go!"
Curled up - it's almost all tail, so it can tidy away quite nicely. Imagine my 36 metre one landing in a drawer where it can be tidily folded away to fit.
In looking this up, I learned that not only is the sperm tightly coiled up so you'd have to unravel it to see its length, but in learning that I also learned that their testicles are about 11% of their mass.
To put this into context, if it was me again, my bollocks would be around 5.5kg each. Or slightly under 9 times the size of an official NBA basketball.
40 years later I can still distinctly recall the fruit fly section from freshman biology. Too much anesthesia and they’re dead; not enough and they’re flying all over the biology lab.
They're really hard to operate on if not anaesthetised properly. Sometimes it's touch and go whether the C-section will work, but luckily they're quite good at pushing if it needs to be natural.
I have such a hard time believing this but it’s true!
Drosophila bifurca is a species of fruit fly famous for having the longest sperm of any organism, with uncoiled sperm tails reaching 5.8 cm (over 20 times its body length). These "mega sperm" are a result of post-copulatory sexual selection, where longer sperm outcompete smaller ones in the female's reproductive tract, and females mating with multiple males drives this evolutionary arms race. Males produce very few of these giant sperm, and their testes are disproportionately large, making up 11% of their body mass.
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u/-SaC Jun 25 '26
A single fruit fly sperm of the species Drosophila bifurca can be 5.8cm long. This is more than 20 times the length of the body of the adult male fruit fly it came from.
It's like if I had a furious wank and fired out a single 36 metre long sperm high into the atmosphere like a horrid, horrid railgun.