Video Transcript
A list of organisms and their
typical lifespan, in the wild, is given below. (1) Human body louse: up to 30
days. (2) Lion: 10 to 14 years. (3) Blue whale: 80 to 90 years. (4) Clown fish: six to 10
years. Which organism would you expect to
produce the largest amount of offspring per successful fertilization?
This question presents a list of
organisms with their typical lifespans and asks which is expected to produce the
largest number of offspring. Recall that the number of offspring
that an organism produces is usually dependent on a few factors. One of these factors includes how
much parental care the organism can invest. An organism’s reproductive strategy
is often described in terms of quality versus quantity. All organisms have a fixed amount
of energy that they can expend, like, for example, most fish dedicate all of this
energy into producing a large quantity of offspring, of which only a few will
survive. On the other hand, some organisms
will invest all of their energy into producing one or two new organisms with a high
survival rate.
The relationship between the
typical lifespan of an organism and how many offspring it produces per successful
fertilization event is usually an inverse relationship. This means that as one variable
increases, the other will decrease. So an organism that lives for a
very long time is expected to produce only one or two high-quality offspring and
care for that offspring over the course of its lifetime. On the other hand, an organism that
only lives for a very short time can be expected to produce large quantities of
offspring.
Now that we’ve reviewed this
relationship, we can answer our question correctly. The organism that we would expect
to produce the largest amount of offspring per successful fertilization would be the
one with the shortest lifespan. The correct answer is, therefore,
the human body louse.
