May 11, 2018 — The bigger a female fish grows, the more eggs she lays — disproportionately so.

That’s the conclusion driven home in a report published Thursday in the journal Science. Biologists at Monash University in Australia and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama gathered egg data from 342 fish species across the world’s oceans.

At the extreme end, the vermilion snapper, Rhomboplites aurorubens, had a 400-fold difference in eggs between the littlest and biggest mama fish. A small female snapper lays around 4,000 eggs. A whopper of a vermilion snapper can deposit eggs by the million, study authors Diego Barneche and Dustin Marshall, colleagues at Monash University, told The Washington Post.

This research won’t come as a surprise to any field biologists who work with fish. Mark Wuenschel, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and was not a part of this study, said the size effect was so well known it has an acronym among researchers: BOFFFF, for Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish. But this work is valuable because a BOFFFF’s importance is often tough to assess, Wuenschel said — because these fish are fished out of the population.

Read the full story at the Washington Post