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Cricket Sets Testicle Size Record

By LiveScience Staff
posted: 09 November 2010 07:33 pm ET

A species of cricket has broken an unlikely world record: largest testis in relation to body weight.

The Tuberous bushcricket's testes account for 14 percent of its body weight. To put that in perspective, the testes of a man weighing 200 pounds (91 kilograms) with that ball-to-body ratio would weigh 28 pounds (12.7 kg).

The bushcricket, whose anatomical extremes are reported today (Nov. 9) in the journal Biology Letters, edges out the record of a species of fruit fly, Drosophila bifurca, whose testes to body weight ratio has been recorded as 10.6 percent.

Oddly enough, the researchers report, the cricket's large testes don't produce greater volumes of semen per ejaculate. In fact, they produced less voluminous sperm than smaller testes.

"Traditionally it has been pretty safe to assume that when females are promiscuous, males use monstrously-sized testes to deliver huge numbers of sperm to swamp the competition - even in primates," study researcher James Gilbert of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "Our study shows that we have to rethink this assumption. It looks as though the testes may be that big simply to allow males to mate repeatedly without their sperm reserves being exhausted."