Trolls are extraordinarily fertile and virile, able to bear dozens of young in a single pregnancy. Because their bellies simply continue to expand to accommodate however many children they produce, and their breasts swell to produce enough milk to feed however many there are, there is no real limit to this. âDozensâ is just a safe estimate. But since every time a troll has sex, they might conceive even more children, this makes them far more akin to broodmother-types. Consider a fully pregnant troll, already bearing twenty-something babies, and has a night with her special someone. The next day, she might have an additional twenty-something eggs, and might have nearly fifty children by this point!
And the voracious sexual appetites of trolls never die off during pregnancy. They could have hundreds of children by the time the first cycle gives birth, and continually do so again and again. Granted this does take a long time; troll pregnancies require far longer times than humans do, without much apparent reason for why this is so. Sometimes itâs based on blood: rustbloods have the shortest, at a few years or so. Cooler bloods might have pregnancies that take decades to come to term, and rumor has it that the Condesce is hiding a pregnancy that has been going on long before the main cast was ever born; it may not come to term until a normal human lifespan ends.
So why they donât reproduce quickly, when they do, they have population explosions. Human society as a whole doesnât realize this, and the Lalondes are very careful to make sure that they donât⊠at least until a time that troll numbers are high enough that humans wonât be able to just blindly attack trolls in fear of being replaced.
It does remain quite possible that, within the next fifty years or so, sheer numbers will cause the trolls to become the âfaceâ of Earth, and interplanetary travel will be important simply to ease overpopulation concerns. Medicines to artifically curb troll fertility will likely become commonplace, assuming trolls donât have the ability to simply shut off impregnation.
