World's oldest animal sperm found in tiny crustaceans trapped in Myanmar
amber

Date:
September 16, 2020
Source:
Queen Mary University of London
Summary:
New research has led to the discovery of world's oldest animal
sperm inside a tiny crustacean trapped in amber around 100 million
years ago in Myanmar.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
An international collaboration between researchers at Queen Mary
University of London and the Chinese Academy of Science in Nanjing
has led to the discovery of world's oldest animal sperm inside a tiny crustacean trapped in amber around 100 million years ago in Myanmar.


==========================================================================
The research team, led by Dr He Wang of the Chinese Academy of Science
in Nanjing, found the sperm in a new species of crustacean they named Myanmarcypris hui. They predict that the animals had sex just before
their entrapment in the piece of amber (tree resin), which formed in
the Cretaceous period.

Fossilised sperm are exceptionally rare; previously the oldest known
examples were only 17 million years old. Myanmarcypris hui is an ostracod,
a kind of crustacean that has existed for 500 million years and lives
in all kinds of aquatic environments from deep oceans to lakes and
rivers. Their fossil shells are common and abundant but finding specimens preserved in ancient amber with their appendages and internal organs
intact provides a rare and exciting opportunity to learn more about
their evolution.

Professor Dave Horne, Professor of Micropalaeontology at Queen Mary
University of London said: "Analyses of fossil ostracod shells are
hugely informative about past environments and climates, as well as
shedding light on evolutionary puzzles, but exceptional occurrences of fossilised soft parts like this result in remarkable advances in our understanding." During the Cretaceous period in what is now Myanmar,
the ostracods were probably living in a coastal lagoon fringed by trees
where they became trapped in a blob of tree resin. The Kachin amber of
Myanmar has previously yielded outstanding finds including frogs, snakes
and a feathered dinosaur tail. Bo Wang, also of the Chinese Academy of
Science in Nanjing added: "Hundreds of new species have been described in
the past five years, and many of them have made evolutionary biologists re-consider long-standing hypotheses on how certain lineages developed
and how ecological relationships evolved." The study, published in
Royal Society Proceedings B, also has implications for understanding the evolutionary history of an unusual mode of sexual reproduction involving
"giant sperm." The new ostracod finds may be extremely small but in
one sense they are giants.

Males of most animals (including humans) typically produce tens of
millions of really small sperm in very large quantities, but there are exceptions. Some tiny fruit flies (insects) and ostracods (crustaceans)
are famous for investing in quality rather than quantity: relatively
small numbers of "giant" sperm that are many times longer than the
animal itself, a by-product of evolutionary competition for reproductive success. The new discovery is not only by far the oldest example of
fossil sperm ever found but also shows that these ostracods had already
evolved giant sperm, and specially-adapted organs to transfer them from
male to female, 100 million years ago.

Each ostracod is less than a millimetre long. Using X-ray microscopy the
team made computer-aided 3-D reconstructions of the ostracods embedded
in the amber, revealing incredible detail. "The results were amazing --
not only did we find their tiny appendages to be preserved inside their
shells, we could also see their reproductive organs," added He Wang. "But
when we identified the sperm inside the female, and knowing the age of
the amber, it was one of those special Eureka-moments in a researcher's
life." Wang's team found adult males and females but it was a female
specimen that contained the sperm, indicating that it must have had sex
shortly before becoming trapped in the amber. The reconstructions also
revealed the distinctive muscular sperm pumps and penises (two of each)
that male ostracods use to inseminate the females, who store them in
bag-like receptacles until eggs are ready to be fertilised.

Such extensive adaptation raises the question of whether reproduction
with giant sperms can be an evolutionarily-stable character. "To show
that using giant sperms in reproduction is not an extinction-doomed extravagance of evolution, but a serious long-term advantage for the
survival of a species, we need to know when they first appeared" says
co-author Dr Renate Matzke-Karasz of Ludwig-Maximilians-University
in Munich.

This new evidence of the persistence of reproduction with giant sperm for
a hundred million years shows it to be a highly successful reproductive strategy that evolved only once in this group -- quite impressive for
a trait that demands such a substantial investment from both males and
females, especially when you consider that many ostracods can reproduce asexually, without needing males at all. "Sexual reproduction with giant
sperm must be very advantageous" says Matzke-Karasz.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Queen_Mary_University_of_London. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. He Wang, Renate Matzke-Karasz, David J. Horne, Xiangdong Zhao,
Meizhen
Cao, Haichun Zhang, Bo Wang. Exceptional preservation
of reproductive organs and giant sperm in Cretaceous
ostracods. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,
2020; 287 (1935): 20201661 DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2020.1661 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200916131057.htm

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