Number of virion particles produced overall in the course of plaque formation.
See also plaque yield.
The use of the term "fecundity" is done to imply an equivalence between plaques and individual if multiunit organisms. That is, the plaque can either be viewed as the growth of a population of phages, in which case plaque productivity may be used instead of plaque fecundity, or instead as a more coordinated entity that more systematically exploits a localized collection of phage-susceptible bacteria.
With the latter, plaque as individual organism, "fecundity" is an appropriate descriptor of productivity. For plaques as collections of individual phages, fecundity is less appropriately employed versus productivity. Equivalently, one could could contrast fecundity or productivity of bacterial microcolonies.
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