They respond to your diet

Want supercharged sperm, or just a nudge to the slow guys? Turns out, studies suggest some nutrients are good for sperm quality and quantity. For instance, studies in mice have suggested the fatty acid found in fish called docosahexnoic acid, or DHA, is essential for sperm formation. Researchers reported why DHA is so critical in October 2011 in the journal Biology of Reproduction; they found that DHA turns dysfunctional round-headed sperm into strong swimmers with cone-shaped heads packed with egg-opening proteins.

 

For older men, an antioxidant-rich diet, or multivitamin, may be in order. A study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that men over 44 with high vitamin-C diets had 20 percent less DNA damage to sperm than their peers who consumed the least vitamin C. Antioxidants, vitamin E, zinc and folate had similar effects, the researchers reported in 2012 in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

Animals have you beat

Humans may have odd-looking sperm, but the prize for weird sex cells goes to the animal kingdom (the non-human one). Take the male diving beetle whose sperm, rather than going it alone, travel in pairs, clusters and even in chains of hundreds or thousands of the swimmers. The odd teamwork may be the result of beetle sperm having to keep up with the ever-evolving reproductive tracts of female diving beetles. "When you look at the intricate morphology of the reproductive tracts, you can't help but think that sperm needs Swiss army knives and compasses to make it through there," study researcher Scott Pitnick, a biologist at Syracuse University in New York, said in a statement. "The females make it really complicated."

 

Take the sperm of the male diving beetle, which is seriously strange: Instead of swimming in the female reproductive tract on their own, individual sperm cells often stick together in pairs, in clusters and even in long chains of hundreds or thousands. And then there are the naked mole rats whose bizarre looks are paired with equally odd sperm: Researchers found most of their sperm can't even swim, with 0.just 0.1 percent considered fast swimmers. Even so the males with mutant sperm fathered offspring.

  Long misunderstood

Antony van Leeuwenhoek may have discovered a new world of cells in seminal fluid, but he was very mistaken about how sperm work to fertilize eggs. In fact, the process of fertilization wasn’t proven until 1879, according to “A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis” (The Free Press, 2001). In the 1600s, researchers believed that humans came preformed, curled in miniature inside either the egg or the sperm. “Spermists,” as the believers in the latter theory were called, even claimed to be able to see tiny humanoids inside the head of sperm cells. These spermist argued that women simply provided an incubator for the male seed.

 They get a little help

Sperm are strong little swimmers, but they get help when it comes to penetrating the egg. A burst of a female-produced hormone progesterone .This encourages sperm to wiggle their little tails frantically in order to push through the egg’s protective membrane. A protein called catsper in sperm cells is resp for recieving the hormonal signal,