FECUNDITY

The university is threatening to close school tomorrow! Apparently, there’s a huge storm coming this way. If class are canceled, I have plans to go sledding. But if classes aren’t canceled, I’ll still have to go to my Sex, Relationships and Reproductive Systems class (“Sex” for short).

During class, a classmate wrote “fertility v. fecundity” in her notebook in loopy cursive. I thought that I missed that part in the lecture, so I wrote it down too. I would look it up later, I told myself.

So I did, and the subject is hard to understand at first. Fecundity and fertility are confusing, and their meanings are often switched, depending on who uses the terms.

After browsing through a few science sites, I learned that, demographically,  fertility represents the output of reproduction. Fecundity represents the ability to reproduce.

Blog of Science uses this example: “In a population of 26 year old human females, 95% might be physiologically capable of giving live birth, while perhaps only 10% might actually have a baby that year.” Fecundity would correlate with the first figure and fertility with second.

For more information, visit this site. It helped me in this post.