system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Which organisms have a high ratio of mature mass to sperm+egg/seed/starting mass? Does this tell us anything useful?

For example, if a human egg and sperm are ~4ug, and the average adult mass is 70kg, then the ratio for humans is ~1.75\*10^10. If a giant sequoia seed is 50mg, and the average grown mass is 100,000kg, then the ratio for giant sequoias is ~2\*10^9.

My intuition is that organisms that grow larger (i.e. blue whales) and organisms with smaller "starting" mass would have a higher ratio here. Is there any significance to this, or is it just a meaningless number?
gpt
Comparing across very different taxonomic groups is not very helpful. The 70kg of an adult human and 100,000kg of a mature giant sequoia do not represent the same thing at all. The majority of the sequoia's mass is non-living material in the trunk while both the human and the sequoia also have shed large amounts of their produced biomass, but in different proportions and patterns. So a comparison like this can only really be informative when it's made between functionally similar organisms. Say, perhaps just terrestrial mammals or just annual plants.

Also, for animals, birthweight is probably more interesting than the weight of egg+sperm just as seed mass is more interesting for seed plants than the combined mass of their own egg and sperm cells (which plants do have, of course).

Comparison of seed mass to mature plant dry mass for an annual plant is commonly used as a measure of photosynthetic efficiency.

Comparison of birthweight to adult mass within a group like mammals is a useful measure of developmental processes.