How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#2neat experiment! lol
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#3[deleted]
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#4Of course the biggest shortcoming of all is that breeding will quickly outpace the food supply and many cats will starve to death or die of other causes without having reproduced.
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#5Of course the biggest shortcoming of all is that breeding will quickly outpace the food supply and many cats will starve to death or die of other causes without having reproduced.
Realistically, sure, but if someone were really determined to carry this out in real life - let's say, the government of Thailand for no real reason - they'd be able to afford to feed 10,000 cats pretty easily.
Oh, and what if we assume that the cats can or will eat each other, or corpses of other cats?
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#6Source code would be cool. With some tweeking you could edit the source for other animals. Is there any other stats formula out there that does this kind of thing?
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#7Thing is this: 1) not all survive out of a litter, even after several weeks, 2) if a cat has litters too close together, she will often refuse to nurse the second litter and they will all die. If everything that gave birth by litter survived, we humans wouldn't be here.
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#8Right, so cats are close to an r-selection strategy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
If you were to do the same calculation with fruit flies, or even bacteria, you'd probably reach the number of atoms in the universe (~ 10^80) in less than five years. For various reasons, the exponential will turn into a logistic curve pretty soon (unstated assumptions of the article include the availability of food, water, space and the absence of predators).
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#9Of course the biggest shortcoming of all is that breeding will quickly outpace the food supply and many cats will starve to death or die of other causes without having reproduced.
Realistically, sure, but if someone were really determined to carry this out in real life - let's say, the government of Thailand for no real reason - they'd be able to afford to feed 10,000 cats pretty easily. Oh, and what if we assume that the cats can or will eat each other, or corpses of other cats?
Feeding 10,000 cats--not that hard.
Getting 10,000 cats to breed optimally--pretty much impossible. Heck, try getting three of them to optimally not fight each other for a week at a time.
Re: How many cats you'd have if you had 1 female and left it with males for 5 years
#10It is possible to have dozens or more, since the female cat can have a litter from multiple sires. A female cat can mate with multiple tom's during the estrus (7-21 days) or heat cycle.