If alligators lay an average of 40 eggs a mating season, how come we don’t have an alligator epidemic? Rabbits only have 12 offspring by comparison!!

Question

Seriously. Some gators can lay NINETY EGGS! How is this not a problem? How does nature handle this? Why aren’t we up to our knees in big scaly bellowing carnivores?

In: 12

Answer 1

Only a fraction of them survive to adulthood.

Same for most animals who produce a lot of offspring. They do so because the chances of survival for each one is so low. Think of those videos of thousands of turtles going down the beach to the sea. A lot of them will be killed by birds before they get to the sea and then by other animals once in the sea.