Jon and Kate Plus 365,000,000???

Jon and Kate Plus 8 is one of the current favorite shows at my house. If you haven't heard of it, the basic storyline follows the Gosselin family (somewhere in Pennsylvania). The parents, Jon and Kate are really normal people (really, they seem pretty normal) that happen to have a brood of 8 (twins and sextuplets). This brood makes their lives film-worthy. Not to mention that Jon and Kate are interesting and quirky.

Sextuplets is a lot of kids for a human to have all at once (6 for those of you that don't remember the prefixes that coincide with the number). The record for the most babies born (but none of them survived) was 9 by a Malaysian woman in 1999. For humans that amount is almost incomprehensible, but to some others in the animal world, 9 isn't all that many at all. I looked up the records for the most young born to an animal, and thanks to Animal Planet's Most Extreme television show, the list was already made for me:

Female Tapeworm- Each section of its body can grow up to be a new tapeworm and can give birth to a million babies a day (Jon and Kate Plus 365,000,000 not filmed in PA but in some poor sucker's intestines, now THAT'S a show!)
Female Termite- The queen can give birth to 30,000 babies a day (Big deal, what else does a termite have to do?)
Aphid- The young are pregnant before they are born. If all aphids survive, there would be one octillion aphids. That would cover the United States 14 ft. deep in aphids. (Yuck and who did the math on that one? Someone with A LOT of spare time!)
Female Nine-banded Armadillo- It can give birth to identical quadruplets and postpone pregnancy for three years! (Now that's kinda sweet and efficient, get em all out of the way at once.)
Surinam Toad-It can carry 100 babies on its back. (And I complained when my kids were little enough that all three of them wanted me to hold them at once!)
Rabbit- They can start a new family every month. (Good for them because they are prey for a lot of animals and end up more often than not dead on the road or via a lawnmower, they gotta keep at it.)
Female Tasmanian Devil- In a single litter, it can give birth to 30 babies, but only the four that get to her four nipples first survive. (There is no bonding going on that THAT dinner table!)

All of those examples make my family of 8 growing up seem small, and Jon and Kate with 8 little ones, piece of cake!