Back in my sophomore year of college, I dissolved caffeine pills and gave the solution to C-Fern sperm and watched them under a microscope. Guess what? They went NUTS. The rate of their flagellations easily doubled, if not tripled. Any idea why?
this is…..really interesting tbh. i’m tempted to be like ‘they just like that dank coffee man’ but i feel like there might be a better hypothesis here. here are my ideas:
option 1: the caffeine messes with their motility so they get a signal to speed up.
option 2: fern sperm know where to go to fertilize other gametophytes because the female organs secrete compounds that create a chemical gradient that the sperm senses and follows. idk how they sense it or how broad their receptors for those hormones are, but it might be possible that the sperm sensed the caffeine around them and thought they were close to a female gametophyte but were unsure of which way to go (this theory is debunked if fern sperm don’t speed up as they get farther up the chemical gradient. idk if they do or not). according to the wikipedia article on sperm chemotaxis, fern sperm- at least in some species- are attracted to dicarboxylic acids. its kind of a stretch, but i can kind of see it fitting depending on which parts of the molecule the sperm is binding to.
here’s caffeine:
and here’s a very basic dicarboxylic acid (oxalic acid):
i mean, doesn’t caffeine cause it’s effects in humans because it interacts with hormones and neuron pathways, etc? like, sperm- especially fern sperm- don’t have any of those complexities. so i’m inclined to think it’s just a happenstance thing and they aren’t like, being caffeinated they way we might.
if i was to replicate this experiment, i think i would test it out by putting a drop in a solution and seeing if they actively follow it, and if so, if they actively follow it faster than they would follow a natural gametophyte secretion. even better yet, if that works, test if they prefer caffeine by putting a drop of natural gametophyte hormone and a drop of caffeine in opposite sides of a controlled arena thing, then seeing in which direction they go, and how fast they go there.
so it turns out that u can buy the fern spores anon was talking about (which then grow into the organs that produce sperm) online for like $25. i have a solid three weeks of break coming up very soon with nothing to do. i could totally test this. its literally in my power to test this.
the thing is that im gonna need to find a way to isolate the sperm when they start producing them. and im gonna need like, agar and shit. and im gonna have to read up on some of the research and how to actually work with these because ive never done them before (we were supposed to in one of my bio entry labs, but they didn’t grow our semester and we had to do something else). and i guess i should have like, a plan for this experiment, and if i want to get serious i should think of a way to measure quantitatively my results. and this is a vial with literally thousands of spores, so i, a lone university student, could accidentally become a father to like 400 fern gametophytes set on having a wild sexy time. but i could do it. i could feasibly find out if fern sperm prefer coffee over pussy. this is literally within my reach (if anon is ok with me trying it out)
PTA archive 