How many eggs can a red snapper produce?
Red snappers, like many other marine fish species, are batch (or serial) spawners. This means they are capable of repeatedly spawning batches of eggs every few days over the course of the entire spawning season, a strategy that allows them to produce and spawn many times more eggs than if they only spawned a single time per season. The number of eggs spawned in each batch varies with the size of the individual and can be as few as a 1000 for a small female to as many as 2.5 million for a large, healthy female. Given that the average time between successive spawning is four days, female red snappers will spawn about 30 times (some more, some fewer) during the spawning season. Even a small red snapper will produce a seemingly respectable 30,000 eggs in a season while a large female might spawn an incredible 75 million or more eggs each season! And if it should survive to the known maximum of its longevity, a female could potentially spawn nearly 4 billion eggs in her lifetime. Naturally,
