January 28th, 2010 by Bay McCulloch
One behavior that resonates throughout the animal kingdom is that males compete for female attention. Does this type of competition extend beyond the act of mating and persist at a cellular level? Research on deer mice done by Harvard biologist Heidi Fisher suggests that it does. When female deer mice go into heat they will frequently mate with more than one male, meaning that many sperm from different males will be vying for her one egg. Sperm have been found to cooperate with each other and clump together on the way to the egg because those sperm that clump have a better chance of survival than those that make the journey alone. Fisher wanted to know if sperm from different males would cooperate regardless of which male they came from or if sperm would only clump with other sperm from the same mouse.