This is a pretty broad question so let me explain:
I obviously know how human babies are made, sperm goes into the egg and develops into a baby. Sometimes more than one baby can come out of the egg splits after fertilization or if two seperate eggs are fertilized at the same time. How do other animals produce more than one baby (like cats, rodents, etc)? Is it the same process?
In: Biology
probably due to evolutionary shenanigans, If an animal gives birth to more offspring at once, there is a greater chance that one of them will survive and pass it on over the generations
Same process. Usually what happens is the mother ovulates multiple eggs at a time. So if a cat has 6 kittens in a litter, it ovulated at least 6 eggs during her heat and 6 eggs got fertilized.
Nine-Banded armadillos are weird, they have identical quadruplets. So only one egg is ovulated, but it splits into four embryos, every time. I don’t know of any other animals where identical twins+ are the norm. (ignoring asexual reproduction)
The principles are the same. But the specific biological mechanisms are tweaked a bit differently through evolution. There is a mechanism preventing multiple eggs from developing at the same time. But sometimes this does happen in humans as well which may result in twins. In other animals this happens more commonly and you may normally have multiple eggs developing at the same time and ovulating at the same time. This results in mostly twins, tripplets, quantuplets, etc.
For mammals, yeah it’s the same process. Animals that have larger litters simply release more eggs during ovulation.
Those types of animals have a different organ for raising the offspring. Humans can only carry one in the uterus most of the time, aside from twins/triplets that often put much strain on the mother without modern medicine. Other types of mammals can carry multiple offspring in their equivalent of a fallopian tube called the horn of the uterus, where they can grow. If this happened in a human, we call it an ectopic pregnancy and it’s fatal without intervention.
Bear in mind this is all from undergrad anatomy which I took a decade and a half ago. I could have gotten names wrong, but you get the jist haha.
Same process, but evolution made it so that some animals produce larger numbers of babies. Animals which in the wild have a high infant mortality rate need to produce enough babies so that there is a good chance that 1 or 2 will survive to adulthood. Similar animals that couldn’t do that went extinct.
Basically the same process, for mammals, anyway. For cats for example, when they’re on heat they release a new egg for every encounter. So the amount of kittens is the amount of times they got laid and can be numerous partners. Rats produce multiple eggs during their mating period. If you’re asking WHY they do, it’s likely because smaller mammals generally have shorter lives and far more predators, so from an evolutionary perspective fewer young will make it to breeding age so producing larger litters will make the species more likely to survive.
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