The life expectancy of a sperm after ejaculation is normally 48 hours in overy. One of the most widespread urban legends around the world of public swimming pools is, along with the fact that if you splash on a diluted chemical in the water it changes color and betrays you in front of others, that if you have an ejaculation in the water it is possible to leave pregnant to some girl who splashes nearby. Relax: you can urinate and ejaculate in a public pool without any of those worries (although naturally it is better that you do not do it for the good of all).
And it is that semen, for those who do not want to get pregnant, is something like a substance contaminated by radioactivity. There are women who do not even tolerate it rubbing their skin: what if, by mistake, it ends up entering the vagina? What if there are jumping sperm?
To take away our fear about semen, well, it is worth knowing how long a sperm is able to survive when it leaves our body in the race of life (getting very euphemistic).
Sperm don’t get along very well with vaginas
Ironically, sperm don’t get along very well with vaginas. More than 99% of the sperm from ejaculation die in the vagina before reaching the fallopian tubes, given the acidic environment of the vagina. Therefore, a man with less than 20 million sperm per ejaculation is considered infertile.
After entering the woman’s body, sperm usually remain fertile between 48 and 72 hours, but only under ideal conditions, that is, during the days of ovulation, which is when the vaginal pH is above 6, which is the pH during the rest of the days (the degree of acidity of the ideal environment for a sperm is 7-7.5, and the temperature: between 37 ºC and 37.5 ºC.)
There are other factors that could influence the fate of sperm. Work carried out by British researchers Robin Baker and Mark A. Bellis, although not yet conclusive, suggests that orgasm offers women a way to control male sperm. If there is orgasm, more sperm is attracted. If there isn’t, it repels to some extent. If the orgasm occurs under the circumstances of an infidelity, then the orgasm produces a greater number of contractions to attract a greater flow of sperm: why, if not, would one run the risk of maintaining an extramarital affair? Something like the effect of unclogging in the drains. The cervix literally sucks.
If we ejaculate outside the vagina, the life expectancy of the sperm is very short. Depending on the humidity and temperature, they can last only minutes. How long it takes for seminal fluid to dry, which is where sperm can survive.
By the way, sperm were first distinguished in 1679 by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the first powerful microscopes.
