I’ve seen videos showing the scale of a human egg and it’s visible to the naked eye- it’s definitely not as small as i thought it would be. So how are girls born with millions of eggs already? Im thinking that large of an amount would take up a considerable amount of space. And how do girls lose eggs from birth if they dont have their first period til adolescence? Since im assuming eggs are mainly lost through periods, excluding trauma or ovarian disorders.
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During a woman’s life, her oocytes go through different stages of development (primary and secondary oocyte stages) and get stuck in different moments of meiosis. By the time a girl is born she already has all of the oocytes she will ever have because her gem cells eventually all specialize and lose the ability to self-renew, these oocyte are stuck in meiosis 1 and we call them primary oocytes.
When a girl starts menstruating clusters of oocytes start being recruited every month for ovulation, the oocytes start maturing and start growing along with a bunch of cells that surround them; they grow because they need to accumulate enough nutrients to support a growing embryo after fertilization, plus mitochondria to power all of that growth. Even though a small cluster of hundreds of follicles start maturing at the early stages of the female menstrual cycle, in normal conditions only one becomes the largest and the rest stop developing and die. Only one big oocyte being ovulated per month.
That’s how most oocytes are lost during a girl’s lifetime
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