JH+sperm+article

Sperm Article (1) What is a germ cell? (male germ cell and female germ cell) "A germ cell is part of the germline and is involved in the reproduction of organizms" Site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_cell (2) Compare the size of a sperm to an egg. Sperm are the smallest cell in the body and an egg is 30 time the width of the sperm and can be seen with the naked eye (3) Compare the number of eggs produced by human females to the number sperm produced by human males. Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. They are born with 1 million of them, but they only use 500 of those 1 million. Men on the other hand are not born with there sperm and they make 4 million every hour. (4) Describe semen. What is the purpose of semen? Semen is the viscous mix of sugars and citric acid that invigorate the sper on there journey to the egg (5) What can be wrong with sperm? What percentage of sperm are usually normal? Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all and a man is lucky to have 15% of his sperm that work well. (6) Where do sperm develop? Why could a fever disrupt sperm production for months? Sperm develop inside the testes which are outside the body because the sperm need to develop in a lower temperature, and fever could disrupt the sperm development because of the raising in temperature (7) Describe in detail the three parts of a sperm cell. (8) How do the sperm react to being in the female reproductive tract? How do they know where to go? When the sperm hit the vagina they are jump started because of the chemicals they incounter and they swim straight ahead like a torpedo. If an egg has burst from its ovarian follicle and been plucked by a fallopian tube, sperm can sense its signature, a telltale shift in calcium ions. Then the sperm get hyperactive and start doing figure eights (9) How is the egg only fertilized by one sperm? A few good sperm find there way the final layer of the eggs membrane where they all do figure eights all trying to get noticed and chosen, but only one can get chosen for the egg.
 * At the tip of the sperm head is the acrosome which is, the “forest” of ancillary cells and connective tissue that surrounds the ripe, ready egg.
 * midpiece, which is packed with the tiny engines called mitochondria that lend the sperm its motility
 * tail, a bundle of 11 entwined filaments that thrashes and propels a sperm forward at the estimable pace of one-twelfth of an inch per minute, the equivalent of a human striding at four miles an hour