Last laugh
Mankind’s most fervent desire, so they say, is to get back into the womb. Swimming offers some remarkable insights into why this may be, writes father-of-three Craig Bishop.
I’m racing to get to Sea Point pool. But the traffic is dire. I risk a glance sideways. The driver next to me is hunched over the wheel, his jaw muscles working furiously. I moan my Zen into the early-morning exhaust fumes – there is no traffic – you are the traffic. If I don’t get to the pool quicksticks, another swimmer will get my lane. Do you see where I’m going with this? See, swimming doesn’t just relieve the weight from wonderfully waterlogged cankles. It’s also a rich source of puns and ever-so-slightly-forced metaphors for pregnancy and birth. The soul of water drips its wisdom into our very cells. Swimmers be we all.
But let’s extend the analogy. When I get a green light, my car surges forward at around 50km/h. This is eerily similar to the speed at which sperm leaves a man’s body. Just saying. When your average bloke gets a green light, his own personal swimmers shoot forwards at around 50km/h, depending on how much zinc and asparagus he has been eating. I only put my swimming cap and goggles on, poolside. But my swimmers have to be ever vigilant for their green light.
But here’s where the maths gets a bit tricky. When I get to the pool, I will be chuffed to swim at around 3km/h. My own personal swimmers, on the other hand, manage about 5mm per minute, or three centimetres an hour. “Eat more bloody zinc!” I hear legions of frustrated wives scream. But wait. It isn’t that simple. That speed is, in fact, five sperm body lengths per second. That’s like a shark swimming at about 10 000km/h. Or me doing Robben Island in about 15 minutes. So my boys are champions. They’ll get to the egg in a day or so, goggles or not. When you do Robben Island successfully, you get given a cool branded towel. I always thought that was a nice conception by the advertisers. When it comes to me and my wife, my own lucky swimmer will also get a branded conception, but of the original sort.
And here’s another thing. Robben Island swimmers rely on the support boat’s SatNav to track currents and water temperatures. Sperm, though, are on their own. How on earth do they find the egg? The relative distances involved are equivalent to you jogging to the moon with loads of mates, most of whom will drop of exhaustion en route.
And here is where reproduction gets very cool. See, the sperm can track temperature gradients. The deeper you go, the warmer it gets. Okay, that’s nothing special, even if you’re only 0.005mm long. I mean, who can’t? When I introduce my thighs to the sea off Camps Bay, I know by how quickly my balls shoot into my stomach how cold it is. But this is not all. The egg, the little minx, seems to know when the boys are getting goggled up, and she starts releasing a complex sequence of chemicals that alter the concentration of calcium inside the sperm. This affects the speed at which the sperm wag their tails. Go figure. But it gets even better. It is not the concentration of calcium that matters.
It is the difference in concentration. To get technical, the sperm appear to be able to calculate the original concentration of calcium inside themselves, and the amount that concentration changes. The word for that is calculus. And that truly is remarkable. You’re only supposed to be able to do that about 16 years after conception, in your highschool maths class.
So get yourself and your pregnant wife down to the pool asap. It won’t guarantee your kid will get an A in the STEM subjects, nor be a good swimmer. But it lets you ponder the bikini-clad mysteries of maths and life to your heart’s content. ●