Prodigious Egg Producers

● Sea creatures produce enormous numbers of eggs to help to keep their species from becoming extinct. “In the open sea a female cod may lay six million eggs each season,” so report authors Lorus J. and Margery J. Milne in their book The Mating Instinct. “A salmon high in a western stream can do better than five times this number. The lowly oyster, cemented by one shell to the bottom, lifts the other and casts out into the ocean as many as half a billion eggs per year. Along the California coast those shell-less snails, the sea hares, do about as well. A five-pound, two-ounce sea hare​—only one third full size—​laid eggs in strings at a measured rate of 41,000 eggs per minute. Over a period of four months and one week . . . 478,000,000 eggs [were tallied] from this single individual​—which is a continued output averaging 2,640 per minute, hour after hour, for those eighteen weeks. And this was representative, not a record maximum.”