The amazing, icky, miracle of life

somethingchanged:

Jesus Christ, this is an egg. Why so solo? I thought one had millions and millions of them, like caviar.

Hundreds of thousands, I believe: they ripen one at a time, except occasionally when there are two and then you have fraternal twins (or you take fertility drugs and then you have octuplets, or whatever).

I once I had a hilarious argument about this with an ex-boyfriend’s male flatmate - hilarious because he thought that women only had a couple hundred eggs in their lifetime, and always lost two a month, and I was like, ‘um, do you have a twin? So, no.’ And thus I won the argument by dint of being a woman. But on reflection, the spat was actually a sublimation of our rivalry for the ex-boyf’s affection, so I guess in the end the flatmate won.