Good stimulating questions, Bill.  The egg thing certainly got
me thinking.  I don't have a calculator handy, but if the one
septillion per year number you quoted from Abbott is correct,
that is still about 31.7 quadrillion eggs per SECOND.  Seems
to me like that would be a continuous explosion.  Just for a
magnitude comparison, the most recent consensus is that
the universe is only about 378.7 quadrillion seconds old.  I'm
sure Crassotrea gigas probably is the most prolific, but it sounds
to me like somebody might have made an error either in printing
or dealing with magnitudes.   If the oyster occupied one cubic
foot of volume, dividing that by 31.7 quadrillion would come up
with a very small egg, and assuming the oyster wasn't made up
totally of eggs, then reduce the size by another factor of 10 or
100 or 1000...
 
It's hard for me, and most humans, to deal with really big numbers.
I think it was Jay Leno who said, referring to Bill Gates' 12.9 billion
dollar fortune, "Just think.  He could blow 12.4 billion dollars, and
then he'd only have 500 MILLION DOLLARS to survive on..."
 
Malo o Samoa,
 
 
 
Don
 
----------
> From: Pacaggg <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: ?
> Date: Sunday, March 15, 1998 7:04 AM
>
>          O.K.  Maybe the Giant  Pacific Oyster isn t the most prolific.
>
>     See what you can do with this one.
>
>       Possibly the largest living species in the animal kingdom is a
mollusk.
>
> ARCHITEUTHIS   larveyi       Kent
>
> Harvey s Giant Squid   is known to grow up to the length of 55 feet.
>
> And then there s:
>
> ARCHITEUTHIS  dux,    It may grow up to 60 feet in length.
>
>           The Blue Whale has been known to grow up to 50 feet in length.
>
>     Who knows, there still many things we don t know about the sea
>
> and what lives in it.
>
>                Bill