On this week’s episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Alyssa Saunders. Alyssa studies the reproductive biology of African electric fish, called mormyrids, with a focus on their sperm and eggs. These freshwater fishes are found throughout lakes and river throughout the African continent and are used by research laboratories across the globe to study questions in evolution, neuroscience, behavior, and other biological disciplines. Besides their amazing ability to produce electricity, these fishes are also unique in that their sperm cells lack tails. Almost all animal sperm cells have a tail that allows them to swim to eggs to achieve fertilization, but the sperm of these fish do not! This is the only known case of tailless sperm evolving within a vertebrate lineage (it has evolved within 35 other lineages, but all of them are invertebrates). It is unknown what caused mormyrid sperm to lose its tail and how their sperm is still able to travel to and fertilize eggs. Furthermore, the morphology of mormyrid sperm has been known since the 1970s, but very little is known about mormyrid eggs. Alyssa’s work aims to understand how mormyrid sperm lost its tail, how their sperm is still able to fertilize eggs, and to characterize the morphology of the previously ignored female gametes.

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