How to See Sperm at Home Under a Microscope 

Lol😂

😂😂😂😂

💀🤣

Exactly,first hand experience

Woo Hoo! Thank you Ronny, we are so excited for you to receive and start using your kit!

Agreed! Darkfield filters also work, however I've found that because the specimens do not strongly scatter light, you need a very bright transmitted light source to make this work. A 3W LED that is found on most consumer microscopes is too dim to get a meaningful image. Also the heads will show up much brighter than the flagella, and so if you are using a camera to image the specimens it is hard to have both the head and flagella properly exposed without blowing out the image. Advice to anybody trying to use darkfield to image sperm - use a darkfield filter with an NA stop just above the NA of the objective so that you are maximizing the oblique light that hits the sample. If you are using a camera you may need to manually adjust the exposure to account for the dark sample.

did you try?

A phone microscope will not have a high enough magnification nor the necessary illumination setup to observe sperm. See the what microscopes can see sperm video for more details

It's the USB eyepiece camera that we include in the Sperm Observation Kit and in the Horizons Lite Kit. It happens to have really good edge detection which is why we included it in the Sperm Kit. Basically any microscope camera will work better for this than your eye by themselves. If you are looking to build out a kit to view sperm specifically, I highly recommend you include a camera of some kind in your setup. Here's a link to the camera in the video: microsafari.org/collections/shop-all/products/usb-2-0-cmos-digital-eyepiece-microscope-camera

Good question! No, those are likely just particles that are moving due to brownian motion (not necessarily alive). Sperm cells should all be roughly the same size and, unless they are greatly malformed, will have a flagella (the tail).

Sure thing. I agree, a sperm kit is probably not the ideal gift for your daughter! I don't know what your budget or age of your daughter is but I'll throw out the Carson Microbrite has been a favorite of ours recently. Check out my general microscope recommendation videos or you can wait for a couple of weeks when we release our 2024 recommendations

It could be a couple of reasons: 1. Our filming studio is in a warehouse that gets quite cold in the winters. I remember it being about 40degF that day. Not the ideal environment for sperm to be the most active! 2. When you do a sperm count test in a lab, they have you wait 7 days since your last ejaculation, which is when your sperm count/count of motile sperm will be approximately the highest (and for consistency between patients). Let's just say that we were filming back to back to back sperm related videos that day and the days prior, and this was the last video we filmed ;)

Could be a couple of reasons. The process of collecting and micropipetting the sample can sometimes kill the sperm cells. The office that I was doing this in was also really cold that day. I think in this sample I also opened up on a small bubble at first so the sperm were out of the liquid.

Would dropping the lens on the drop kill them?

@@E85_STIif it hits them then yes

It really depends on what the illumination method is more than the magnification. I made a blog article that should answer your question: microsafari.org/pages/what-kind-of-microscope-you-need-to-see-sperm

Depends on how many aren't moving. According to the World Health Organization, men can have up to 65% of the total sperm be not motile and still be considered "fertile". The assessing sperm motility section of the blog article I wrote will have your answers. It is most of the way down the page. microsafari.org/pages/the-comprehensive-diy-guide-to-assessing-male-fertility-at-home

I wish you could tell us how you got this sample.