How to Use unfertilized in a Sentence

unfertilized

adjective
  • Vets found an unfertilized egg that the kiwi was unable to lay.
    — Rhea Mogul, CNN, 28 Dec. 2020
  • Known to the world as a delicacy, caviar is unfertilized fish eggs with a salty taste.
    — Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY, 4 Oct. 2022
  • But now, researchers revived the cells and fused one of them with an unfertilized egg from a domestic horse.
    — Jonathan Wosen San Diego Union-Tribune, Star Tribune, 22 Oct. 2020
  • When your body recognizes that your egg is unfertilized, your hormone levels start to drop.
    — Sherri Gordon, Health, 11 June 2025
  • Drones develop from unfertilized eggs and are much larger than worker bees.
    — Marina Johnson, Detroit Free Press, 4 May 2023
  • One story holds that Julieta once laid a batch of eggs near the enclosure, all unfertilized.
    — Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, 23 Nov. 2023
  • But, Drost said, the eggs are likely unfertilized and will not hatch because they were laid by a lesbian penguin couple.
    — NBC News, 23 Oct. 2020
  • The case for the baby great white sighting While in utero, embryonic sharks feed on unfertilized eggs for protein.
    — Cnn.com Wire Service, The Mercury News, 29 Jan. 2024
  • The gate mechanism prevents plants from wasting resources on unfertilized seeds.
    — Calista Oetama, Sacbee.com, 5 June 2025
  • The procedure begins with the harvesting of unfertilized eggs from a woman’s ovaries.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 5 June 2024
  • Whenever a nesting pigeon flies off to get a bite to eat, the laughingthrushes zip to her nest, hop around in it and poke at her unfertilized eggs with their beaks.
    — Terry Demio, The Enquirer, 10 Apr. 2021
  • Waste and unfertilized eggs left by the fish become part of the food chain, and some of the sucker fry swimming back to the lake are gobbled up by northern pike, muskie and great blue herons.
    — Michael Hawthorne, chicagotribune.com, 12 May 2017
  • In parthenogenesis, a polar body fuses with the unfertilized egg, triggering it to form an embryo.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 18 Feb. 2024
  • Caviar is unfertilized eggs—also known as roe—that are harvested exclusively from the sturgeon family of fish and then salt-cured.
    — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 20 July 2021
  • The females then lay unfertilized eggs that never hatch, ending the reproductive cycle.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 11 June 2026
  • For starters, collecting unfertilized eggs is a harrowing business.
    — Deborah Netburn, latimes.com, 4 July 2018
  • The unfertilized eggs become male drones that do nothing but inseminate the queen—quite literally, flying bags of semen.
    — Ben Huberman, Longreads, 22 Sep. 2017
  • We primates have spindle proteins, which are crucial for cell division, located near the chromosomes in our unfertilized eggs.
    — Molly Glick, Discover Magazine, 26 Nov. 2021
  • Those who have cut trees to produce a pasture or crop field often use it for just a few years and then, when its unfertilized soil has lost nutrients, abandon it or sell it cheap in one of these informal deals.
    — Juan Forero, WSJ, 31 Jan. 2020
  • Kono is particularly proud of the chochin, an ovary surrounding an unfertilized egg, still clinging to its fallopian tube and liver.
    — Caroline Hatchett, Robb Report, 1 Aug. 2022
  • Similar to naturally occurring pregnancies, there is drop off at each step of the journey from an unfertilized egg to a successful birth.
    — Will Croxton, CBS News, 31 May 2026
  • The queen can directly control the numbers of daughters and sons in the colony by laying either fertilized or unfertilized eggs, respectively.
    — Scientific American, 22 Oct. 2021
  • And, roughly 20 years ago, a team managed to find the right deletion to enable a female mouse to give birth to offspring that received a set of chromosomes from each of two unfertilized eggs.
    — ArsTechnica, 23 June 2025
  • Their reproductive system is limited, and females will be carrying far fewer unfertilized eggs in the autumn.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 25 June 2019
  • Next, scientists retrieve an unfertilized egg from another donor animal.
    — Washington Post, 11 Apr. 2022
  • If nights fall below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, possible on any night of the year, blossoms will drop unfertilized, leaving only their stems to taunt us with what might have been.
    — Pam Peirce, San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Sep. 2021
  • Instead of figuring out when fertilization was happening inside a lizard, the researchers used unfertilized eggs instead.
    — Roni Dengler, Discover Magazine, 28 Aug. 2019
  • In wasps, bees and ants, however, males generally are born from unfertilized eggs and therefore contain only genetic information from their mother.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Apr. 2023
  • Parthenogenesis is the development of viable offspring from unfertilized eggs, no sperm necessary.
    — Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 17 Nov. 2021
  • Whereas the goal with IVF is to produce an embryo that will then be implanted in a patient’s body, oocyte cryopreservation banks unfertilized eggs for later use.
    — Courtney Vinopal, Quartz, 8 Feb. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'unfertilized.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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