“IN THE spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,”
according, at least, to the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Now it seems sperm
counts are higher in the spring too. Sterility experts at St Mariana University
School of Medicine in Kawasaki took sperm samples at three-monthly intervals
from 72 university students between May 1999 and December 2000, and measured the
amount of sperm the samples contained. The average density in the spring samples
was 87.3 million sperm per millilitre—up to 10 times the count at other
times. Teruaki Iwamoto and his assistant Shiari Nozawa say they are at a loss to
explain the variations.
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