Eggs, Eggs Everywhere, Part Two: How Many?

Continuing from last week's lesson, I had my students color coloring pages of different egg-laying animals, such as fish, reptiles and birds.

As they colored them, we talked about how many eggs the different animals lay, and that the number of eggs an animal lays usually depends on the animal's chance of survival.

I asked them which of these animals had the least protection by the parents and face the most hazards and which had the most protection. We then made a parallel between the most protected animals had the least amount of eggs and the least protected had the most amount of eggs and that this insured enough but not too many offspring.

We looked at the animal classification chart in terms of this and could see some generalities.

One one end of the spectrum, (egg-laying) mammals take care of their helpless young and have few eggs and on the other end, insects emerge from their eggs as miniature adults and have many predators and therefore have many eggs.

Source:  GEMS: Eggs Eggs Everywhere