eli5: How do other animals produce more than 1 baby at a time?

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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

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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