Thanks and sorry - I just feel like I talk about capacitation quite a bit and it's a little discouraging to hear people have never heard of it before! ;)
Printable View
All sperm exit the peener with this little "hat" on that protects and nourishes them for awhile after ejaculation. They can't fertilize the egg wearing that hat and so chemicals in the VJ (or in the fluids that researchers use to wash the sperm with when they want to look at them under a microscope) signal the sperm to dissolve the hat. When this happens, they get smaller and they also get hyperactive and wiggle around frantically, but they don't live as long as the ones with the hats do. They don't all capacitate at the same time - sperm from any one batch seem to be able to communicate with each other in some primitive way and they coordinate things so while any sperm are alive, some are always capacitated and ready to fertilize any egg that arrives on the scene, while others are chillin' with their protective hats on just in case they're needed later on. As far as we know, it is 4 hours at the earliest for sperm to capacitate and it may be longer.
So what Dr. Shettles did, was peered thru the microscope after having washed some sperm and triggered capacitation, and saw some big fat mellow sperm that seemed to live a long time and thought, "Aha, X" and then some tiny hyper guys that died quick and thought "Ah-so, Y" and then basically made up everything based on that faulty premise - that X were big and slow and hardy and lived a long time, and that Y were tiny and swam fast and could be easily damaged due to their size and they died quickly. BOTH timing and pH are based on this notion and it's all a big bunch of crap because it's not even POSSIBLE to tell the diff. between X and Y sperm in a microscope. He was seeing capacitated and uncapacitated sperm and then jumping to a major conclusion which so happened to be totally wrong. Both X and Y are about the same size and live the same amount of time and while we don't know this with 100% certainty, it's likely that there are always some X and Y sperm capacitated at any given time and some X and Y sperm waiting at any given time.
Thank you for sharing. That is incredibly fascinating!!! :)
After hearing that it would make sense why Ovulation at 12 hrs or after is damn near impossible!
Yeah I know I should have said special microscope like an electron one or.... really high powered?