About 3 days under optimum conditions. The two sexes, hermaphrodites and males, are each about 1 mm in length but differ in appearance as adults. Hermaphrodites produce both oocytes and sperm and can reproduce by self-fertilization. A hermaphrodite that has not mated lays about 300 eggs during its reproductive life span.
Juveniles hatch, and develop through four molts.
The mature adult is fertile for about 4 days and then lives for an additional 10-15 days. This nematode is used extensively as a model system by various disciplines to study behavior, aging, molecular biology, genetics, etc. The adult hermaphrodite has only 959 somatic nuclei, and the adult male has only 1031. The haploid genome size is 8 x 10 to the 7th nucleotide pairs, about eight times that of the yeast Saccharomyces or one-half that of the fruit fly Drosophila. The nematode is easily maintained in the laboratory, where it can be grown on agar plates, in liquid culture with E. coli as a food source, or axenically in liquid media.