My husband has an enormous head. Sometimes this concerns me, when I consider the degree to which skull size may have a genetic basis and the fact that we'll probably reproduce at some point. That has to fit through there? OW.

But maybe I should be grateful. I'll certainly have an easier time of it than female Atlantic bobtail squid (Sepiola atlantica). These mamas, according to a recent study on their spawning behavior, can lay up to one and a half times their own body weight in eggs. That would be like me, at 125 pounds, producing 187.5 pounds of baby. WOW.


She looks tired.

It sounds impossible, in fact. How do they do it?

The secret is to lay multiple batches of eggs, and to eat between your batches. Rodrigues et al., the authors of the study, followed twelve female squid as they did their spawning thing. Some laid all their eggs over the course of just a few days, but others took up to twenty days to finish spawning. And every day they ate (delicious mysid shrimp) about 20% of their own body weight.

Taking into consideration the fact that eating 20% of your body weight over 20 days actually adds up to four times your body weight, we might ask why these gluttons are only producing one and a half times their weight in eggs?

But that's easy to answer. A lot of that food consumption is just getting burned up in metabolism, to fuel the effort of living and laying all those eggs. And in fact, these females, like nearly all squid ever studied, burned themselves out. They all died within a day of laying their last batch of eggs.

Big heads or not, I guess I really do have a lot to appreciate about human spawning strategies.


Rodrigues, M., Garcí, M., Troncoso, J.,&Guerra, �. (2010). Spawning strategy in Atlantic bobtail squid Sepiola atlantica (Cephalopoda: Sepiolidae) Helgoland Marine Research, 65 (1), 43-49 DOI: 10.1007/s10152-010-0199-y