After a lab-simulated heat wave, researchers from England’s University of East Anglia found that male flour beetles produced vastly less sperm. But they also found that the damage wasn’t confined to the males. Sperm inside a female’s reproductive tract became less viable and the sons of the males that endured the hotter temperature became less fertile, too.
Females appeared unaffected by the heat themselves. But if they had already been inseminated, their fertility fell by 30 percent after the heat exposure. This suggests that heat affects not just the manufacture of sperm, but also its later viability, Dr. Gage said.
Dr. Pitnick said that given how sensitive sperm is to temperature change, and that coldblooded insects are less able to protect their sperm, it was smart to “explore detrimental effects on sperm as a candidate cause of widespread decline of invertebrate populations in response to climate change.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/science/sperm-infertility-insects-heat.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FWeather&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=collection
No comments:
Post a Comment