A study led by researchers at The University of Nottingham has discovered that the fertility of dogs may have suffered a sharp decline over the past three decades.If it's true that sperm counts in dogs have declined dramatically – this is, after all, the first study to find this – then that means the cause is probably something common to both dogs and humans, and that probably means an environmental contaminant.
The research, published in the academic journal Scientific Reports, found that sperm quality in a population of stud dogs studied over a 26-year period had fallen significantly.
The work has highlighted a potential link to environmental contaminants, after they were able to demonstrate that chemicals found in the sperm and testes of adult dogs -- and in some commercially available pet foods -- had a detrimental effect on sperm function at the concentrations detected.
On the other hand some people say the whole thing is overblown because sperm counts vary for so many reasons – time of day, season of the year, temperature of the scrotum, time since last ejaculation, even how excited the man is – that we just don't have any good baseline data to work from.
A study showed that the nutritional value of pollen has diminished also. This was done when the ‘Colony Collapse Syndrome’ was being studied, years ago. Beekeepers were looking for anything that might be causing the decline in Queen longevity. Queens used to live many years, documented in marked queens. Now they live fewer years and often go sterile sooner than they should, although their pheromones keep the hive from superseding them, as the hive should do. Poor pollen nutritional values were suspected.
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