Even after they are spawned, when they swell up with seawater, they are only about a millimetre across. A thousand of them would weigh under a gram, twenty thousand much less than an ounce. These little eggs are left to take their chances in a hostile world. They float in the surface waters, where the young fish will find plenty of food when they hatch. But untold millions of predators wait there to feed in their turn on codfish eggs and young.
Life is short and brutal for a baby fish.
Their lifetime egg production may have averaged around fifty million each. For comparison, before we changed things, over her life an average whitetail doe had about twenty fawns in all. That had to be, for otherwise the population would have increased year by year or else died away to nothing. The difference is a measure of how much energy does put into raising each of their young. Not all fish do.