What animal has the biggest sperm in the world? The answer might be surprising

The answer might surprise you, because the sperm of this animal is about 20 times bigger than the animal itself.

Well the answer to whom has the largest sperm in the animal kingdom is the fruit fly! This creature’s sperm is nearly 6 centimetres (2,5 inches) long and is about 20 times the size of the insect itself. It’s a quite unexpected candidate for having the longest sperm, because in human terms this would mean that a guy would have a single sperm as tall as a 12-story building! Damn.

The sperm of a fruit fly is knotted up into a ball and takes up a lot of real estate inside of the female

But how could this by functional and evolutionary advantage? The fruit fly’s sperm is actually knotted up into a ball and they form inside the female’s reproductive tract in which it reaches the massive length. This is all due to the sperms dilution hypotheses, which states that smaller animals have larger sperm and bigger animals have smaller sperm. The bigger the female reproductive organ is the more evolutionarily beneficial it is for the male to produce larger quantities of smaller sperm – like in our case.

In the case of fruit fly sperm, it will take up a lot of real estate when it is inside of the female. This is due to the fact that female fruit flies mate with multiple males, so this will give certain male fruit flies a noticeable advantage over others. The one with the sperm that takes up the most space wins. From this perspective it might be obvious why humans won’t produce the largest sperm in the animal kingdom – human sperm would have to enormous and it would not give us any evolutionary advantage.

SOURCE: OMG facts