A PhD Thesis Explained by Dancing Sperm

Ever struggled to articulate exactly what your PhD is about? Why not try explaining through the illuminating medium of interpretive dance?

Now in its sixth year, Science magazine’s “Dance Your PhD” contest saw 31 PhD candidates with way too much spare time on their hands perform their theses in various styles of dance, for the chance to win $1000 and a trip to a screening at Stanford University in California.

There were entries across different scientific fields, but the overall prize went to a candidate with a background in biology. It turns out dancing chicken sperm make for stiff competition.

Cedric Tan from the University of Oxford put together a three-and-a-half-minute video that saw him—and a group of very obliging friends—dance their way through his thesis, “Sperm Competition Between Brothers and Female Choice.” He explained the concept in the video’s description:

Females of the red jungle fowl (forest chicken) mate with multiple males, which can create competition between sperm of different males in order to fertilize the egg. In my PhD thesis, I explored the effect of brotherhood on sperm competition and female choice. Interestingly, the brother of the first male that the female has mated with invests more sperm in the female than the non-brother of the first male mate. However, the female ejects a higher proportion of sperm from the brother of the first mate and favours the sperm of the non-brother, facilitating a higher fertility by the non-brother’s sperm.

Tan illustrated this phenomenon with choreography inspired by chickens and sperm, which it seems are rather partial to weight-lifting and synchronised swimming, respectively. He told Oxford University’s science blog that it took four weeks to train the dancers (and presumably to convince them that prancing about in tiny swim shorts and caps was a good idea), and another three to edit the video. I guess it’s good to have a side project when your day-to-day consists of massaging chickens to extract their sperm.

For the educated eye, Tan also threw in some references to observations on sperm biology. Watch closely and you’ll see some of the dancing sperm move faster while others get stuck in circles. The admittedly catchy soundtrack features two original—and educational—folk-punk songs by Stuart Noah, which is the alias of one of Tan’s thesis supervisors, Stuart Wigby. These Oxford academics sure know how to party.

Tan has said he will definitely be entering the contest again next year, and promised, “It will be sexier, stickier and sizeably bigger, and in the style of a musical.”

If you just can’t wait, here are the other category winners from this year: