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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

To pick one specific aspect:

Male pseudoscorpions smell the number of competitor males that have copulated with a female and adjust by progressively decreasing sperm allocation as the number of different male olfactory cues increases from zero to three.

How in the world was this determined? It's presented so neatly, and I certainly believe it, but it's fascinating to think of the procedures that must've been taken to verify such a claim. You'd need a scorpion sperm counter, perhaps, and I'm not sure Amazon sells one.

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Probably some grad student pipets a precise quantity of scorpian semen onto a slide, perhaps with a dye to aid the process, and manually counts the number of sperm with a microscope.

Human sperm tests are done using a similar procedure depending on what you are looking for.

Fascinating; apparently you can perform a sperm count test on yourself with nothing more than a microscope: https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue...

and a spreadsheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertil...

There's a high-quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=Advan...

I'm just surprised it's theoretically possible to do it yourself. Tests are upwards of $100.

Hey, this is great info. Any machine learning engineers have a bunch of spare time on their hands?

Interesting line of thinking. I guess you could pipe a microscope's video feed into a YOLO model and do a count. The hard part would be making it cost effective. Legacy (YC S19) seems to be capturing this market: https://www.givelegacy.com/

$200 is still a hefty price though.

There are automated sperm sample analyzers already, that give sperm concentration, motility (broken down by rapid, slow, and non), morphology, velocity, and more.

Here's a promotional video from 2008 from a maker of such devices [1]. Here's a 2015 video from them showing a newer model [2].

I'm not sure how they actually work. Given the age it probably isn't machine learning.

The same company also sells a home test kit, under the name Yo, which might use machine learning [3]. It uses your smart phone camera. There is also a PC/Mac version that looks like it includes its own camera. $69.95 for either kit, $45.95 for refills for the consumables for 2 tests, $89.95 for 4 tests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw

[3] https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/

Not that surprising. Doing my own is one thing. For counting someone else's sperm, $100 seems pretty low.

I'm reasonably sure that this is the paper in question if someone cares enough to actually want to read it:

"Discriminating Males and Unpredictable Females: Males Bias Sperm Allocation in Favor of Virgin Females", doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.2011.01928.x

These experiments have so many variables that the outcome is sometimes hard to believe (see the section about rats):

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Maybe the don't "adjust", but it is a fear reaction because of the imagined proximity of other males, which kind of distracts from the act ...

How they measured it? Perhaps a fake female with a reservoir, which would introduce even more variables.

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