Video Transcript
A list of organisms and the average
number of offspring they produce per successful fertilization is given below. (1) Human body louse: 4500 eggs,
180 a day. (2) Lion: two to five cubs. (3) Blue whale: one calf. (4) Clown fish: 100 to 1000
eggs. Which organism would you expect to
invest the most time and energy in parental care?
The question lists four organisms
and the average number of offspring they produce per successful fertilization. You might recall that the number of
offspring that an organism produces is a tradeoff between quality and quantity. What does this mean? Some organisms, like frogs and
fish, will invest their energy into producing a large number of offspring. However, they will not exhibit much
parental care, and only a few of their offspring will survive.
Other organisms take a different
approach. They use a smaller amount of energy
to produce few offspring but use much of their energy in aiding their offspring’s
growth and development. Some examples of organisms that use
this approach would be penguins or us, humans. So the number of offspring that an
organism produces is inversely related to the amount of parental care that they can
exhibit.
An inverse relationship just means
that as one variable increases, the other will decrease. In this case, as the number of
offspring increases, the amount of parental care will decrease. Therefore, an organism that
produces the most offspring is predicted to exhibit the least amount of parental
care. On the other hand, if an organism
produces only one or two offspring, we would expect them to be very engaged in
parental care.
Now that we have reviewed the
relationship between parental care and number of offspring, we are able to answer
our question correctly. Our question asks, “Which organism
would you expect to invest the most time and energy in parental care?” So our answer choice should be the
organism that produces the fewest offspring. Therefore, the correct answer to
this question is the blue whale.
