This might be a strange question, but why do sea turtles lay eggs on land and not for example dig up holes inside the ocean? They live their whole lives in the ocean, so why do they lay eggs on land? Why travel so far just to lay eggs?
Same goes for some salmon, why do they leave the oceans and lakes, and go upstream on rivers and not lay their eggs where they live?
It is probably something to do with protecting their offspring, but it seems to me that they still have predators that hunt their offspring fairly easily where they hatch/lay their eggs, so maybe there is another reason as well?
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All of evolution is a game of cat and mouse between a species and the various things in the environment that want to kill it. If something has even a marginal benefit to survival, it will likely become a dominant trait given enough time. The adaptation doesn’t have to be _perfect_, just _better_.
So, in both cases, some ancestor of the modern animal decide to lay its eggs in a non-traditional location due to a quirk of genetics and those offspring were better able to survive to adulthood.
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