INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN OCEANOGRAPHY (ITO-98)

GOA, INDIA 12-16 OCTOBER 1998

SPERM MOTION, FERTILITY AND REPRODUCTIVE TOXICITY

G.S. Hobson**, H. Roe**, A.D. Houghton*,
*Dept. of Electronic Engineering, University of Sheffield, U.K.,
** Hobson Tracking System Ltd., 697, Abbey Lane, Sheffield, S11 9ND, U.K.

Sperm Mobility measurements have been made automatically by continuous computer sperm tracking using video equipment on a microscope with dedicated high speed hardware in a personal computer. The paper will review work which has identified the best correlation between sperm motion and its achieved fertility in a wide rage of species. It has been particularly successful for humans, rats, and boars and in Reproductive Technological testing of drugs and chemicals. Only recently, it has started to be applied to fish and will soon be applied to shellfish. Results are likely to be relevant to the future studies of conservation and pollution effects in the oceans.

Of particular interest will be the identification of the factor which will best correlates with fertility in the fish. In mammals, the species independent factor has been the Straight Line Velocity when measured with sperm tracks of more than a few seconds length so that a good statistical measure of a true sperm progression is obtain. This factor has approximately 10 times better accuracy than all the other factors. The fertilisation process in the fish egg is restricted to a particular site on the egg and must be complete in approximately 1 minute and is significantly different from the mammalian process.

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Copyright© National Institute Of Oceanography, Goa,India,1998
updated on 7th July'98