The conversation must have been had, somewhere in a reality TV production office circa 2009: “How do we beat the Octo-Mom?” Ratings, after all, are a hard thing to come by, and like the old saying goes, “if you can’t beat ’em, out-reproduce ’em.”

In terms of sheer numbers, she wouldn’t have been difficult to beat in the field of spawning. Nature, in all its horrifying, John-Carpenter-practical-effects splendor, is positively bursting at the seams with various critters capable of dropping a few dozen rugrats in a single go. But which is the most ambitious? What animal squeezes out the largest number of progeny all at once?

Well, that depends on how you look at it. As you’re probably aware, reproduction is a multifaceted and uniformly disgusting miracle of life that comes in many shapes and sizes across the evolutionary scope. Fish, for example, pretty regularly lay hundreds, even thousands of eggs in a spawning season. According to National Geographic, the championship title goes to the ocean sunfish, a 5,000 pound behemoth that’s estimated to lay 300 million eggs in a season. The takeaway here: the ocean would basically be nothing but a wet pile of sunfish if their eggs didn’t get all first-act-of-Finding-Nemo‘d so frequently.

And not one of them does the honorable thing by getting married first

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