I’m talking about humans specifically here. During school I was always shown animations that showed many sperm swimming to an egg, and then when the first sperm started entering the egg (don’t even know how they do that, do they eat through?), the other sperm just stopped trying and gave up. How do the other sperm know? Are they sentient? What’s stopping loads of sperm going into the same egg? What would happen if 100 sperm went into the egg at once?
In: Biology
As soon as one sperm bonds with the ovum, a chemical process occurs that make the outside impermeable to all the others, effectively instantly. We think there might be a chemical ‘homing beacon’ being sent by the egg prior to this, but there’s no real certainly of that currently.
Generally, competition isn’t a problem, as only a few hundred out of several hundred *million* sperm will actually make the journey all the way there. But if it does happen, cell division cannot occur, and the cell just dies.
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