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Updated: Jan 11, 2026

Manipulation of Ploidy in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: March 15, 2018
Digest: Subcellular reallocation and the evolution of anisogamy in nematodes
1Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.
None:
Why has sperm gigantism evolved, and how do subcellular allocations scale with size? Schalkowski & Cutter (2025) addressed these questions with transmission electron microscopy of Caenorhabditis sperm, finding that a species with giant sperm disproportionately invests in mitochondria, consistent with energetic demands of motility and persistence. Here, the results are interpreted through anisogamy theory, highlighting how ecological conditions can favor sperm gigantism, why such costly sperm remain rare, and how new data invite mechanistic models of gamete evolution.
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