Animals Archives

May 28, 2026May 27, 2026

Beetle Species Study Is Never-Ending

Beetles are essential to life on Earth, serving as food for many animals, but that isn’t all they do. Some beetles recycle carcasses, and others recycle dung. Some beetles help restore the environment after a forest fire. Others exhibit strange and interesting behaviors, such as spraying a noxious chemical at their enemies. One beetle species walks upside-down underwater. Many more beetles do interesting things and fulfill very important roles. Some beetles damage crops or are pests in other ways, especially when they are accidentally moved to new habitats. However, even those beetles that are a nuisance often fill very important roles in their natural environment.

Scientists estimate that there are between five and ten million insect species, which make up about 90% of the world’s animal species. However, only about 925,000 species have been studied enough to be formally described. Of all insect species, the largest number are classified as beetles. Smithsonian sources identify about 350,000 beetle species, but more are discovered each year.

Of the beetle species, about 70,000 are in the Staphylinidae family. One subgroup within that family is Platydracus. According to Wikipedia, there are more than 280 identified Platydracus species. However, recent research in China has identified and recorded 61 previously unknown species. Classifying all beetle species will be an enormous job that will probably never be completed.

We often fail to realize how much diversity exists in the natural world. God has created so many different species, and we haven’t yet been able to study most of them. Even if life has existed on Earth for four billion years, that is not enough time for Darwinian evolution to produce all the species and variety of animals that inhabit this planet.

The more we learn about God’s creation, including the beetle species, the more we are amazed by the complexity and diversity of the essential species that make advanced human life possible.

Reference: popsci.com

May 27, 2026May 26, 2026

There Is Nothing Like an Elephant’s Trunk

Mechanical engineer Andrew K. Schulz at the Max Planck Institute says that elephants are like aliens. He made this claim after leading a study of elephant trunks and concluding that there is nothing like an elephant’s trunk in the entire animal kingdom.

An elephant’s trunk has over 40,000 muscles and is covered with unique “whiskers.” Most mammals have whiskers, but none are like the ones on an elephant’s trunk. The elephant’s whiskers are flexible at the tips and stiffer closer to the skin. For protection, elephants have rough, armorlike skin, but that reduces sensitivity. The elephant’s whiskers are designed to provide sensory detection of its surroundings.

Elephants use their trunks to breathe, smell, grab things, communicate, and perceive objects that are not within their line of sight. The trunk is strong enough to rip a tree out of the ground, but it can also gently pick up a leaf or fruit that it wishes to eat. There is nothing like an elephant’s trunk, with whiskers that have a stiffness gradient to sense the difference between hard and fragile objects. Schulz and the research team suggest that this stiffness-gradient detection can be applied to robotics, where machines must maintain sufficient strength to handle materials yet be gentle enough to avoid damaging the object.

Elephants are not related to any other creature, so attempting to formulate an evolutionary sequence is exceedingly difficult. It seems that elephants were uniquely designed by God to support their environment in various ways. We have noted in previous articles that elephants dig waterholes that provide water for other creatures in desert environments. The more we learn about life on this planet, the more we see that there is nothing like an elephant’s trunk. Living things are the care agents that balance the environment, allowing us to exist.

Reference: Scientific American for May 2026, pages 10 & 11, and scientificamerican.com

May 26, 2026May 24, 2026

A Neatly Arranged Tree of Life

According to the Darwinian concept, gradual changes over long periods lead to the development of new traits. The Darwinian tree of life displays branches leading to diverse life forms. Along each branch, we see new traits emerging and then being further developed in subsequent generations of creatures. That means similar traits indicate common ancestry. Over billions of years, the result should be a tree, with each branch showing an obvious progression of similar traits. A neatly arranged tree of life should be the result. However, that is not the case.

Convergent evolution throws the tree into disorder. Scientists use the term “convergent evolution” to explain similar characteristics appearing on different branches of the tree. Those similarities show up not only in obvious physical traits but even at the genetic level. According to the common understanding of the evolutionary tree, a trait should appear in a branch and then be carried forward, further developed, or even lost in the succeeding branches or twigs. For a neatly arranged tree of life, the same trait should not appear in other, unrelated branches.

According to Richard Dawkins, “It is vanishingly improbable that exactly the same evolutionary pathway should ever be traveled twice.” In other words, it is unlikely that evolution would cause the same trait to appear multiple times in different evolutionary lines. That is, two separate branches of the tree should not be marked by the appearance of the same evolved trait.

However, in many instances, the same trait shows up in animals or plants that are not closely related. In other words, the same evolutionary change occurred independently many times. According to a paper published April 30, 2026, by Yacine Ben Chehida and others in the journal PLOS Biology, “Convergent evolution, the repeated evolution of similar phenotypes, is widespread in nature.” (Phenotypes are the sets of observable characteristics or traits of an organism.)

Who is correct, Richard Dawkins or the paper in PLOS Biology? How can it be “vanishingly improbable” and yet “widespread in nature?” Furthermore, Simon Conway Morris, who has held the Chair of Evolutionary Paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge for more than 30 years, said, “Convergence is ubiquitous.” If by ubiquitous he means present anywhere and everywhere, how can unguided evolution explain that? How can something be “vanishingly improbable” and “ubiquitous” at the same time?

Since a neatly arranged tree of life does not seem to exist, perhaps the existence of a common creator God has more explanatory power than mere chance evolution. For more examples of convergent evolution, read our posts HERE and HERE.

References: scienceandculture.com and journals.plos.org

May 21, 2026May 21, 2026

The Story of Sloth Poop

What if you had to risk your life to go to the bathroom? Imagine what it would be like to know that you might not return home. For three-toed sloths (genus Bradypus), a once-a-week bowel movement can be life-threatening, yet they apparently are not aware of the risk they are taking or of the system they play a role in. The story of sloth poop involves a complex system with three species.

As everyone knows, and their name indicates, sloths are slow. Because of that, they are threatened by fast-moving predators. They have relative safety in the tree tops, but on the ground, they are sitting ducks, or sitting sloths. Being on or near the ground is the main cause of sloth deaths. Their slow climb down and back up is the most energy-intensive thing they do all week. Why don’t these sloths just do their business in the trees and let it fall to the ground? The answer involves another species.

Enter the sloth moths (Cryptoses choloepi) into our story. These moths live nowhere else but in the fur of the sloths. They spend their entire adult lives in sloth fur. The newly emerged moths find a slow-moving sloth, make a home in its fur, and permanently lose their ability to fly. After spending a short adult life in the sloth’s fur, one of two things will happen. The moth will probably die there. A second option for pregnant female moths is to hop off the sloth, land in the pile of poop, lay their eggs there, and die. The larvae that hatch from those eggs will feed on the sloth dung. As they eat and burrow their way into the pile, they create a chamber where they enter the pupal stage.

When the sloth moths complete their pupal stage, they emerge as adult moths. They fly for their first and only time upward into the tree canopy in search of a three-toed sloth. When they find their target, the moths are permanently grounded in the sloth’s fur. There they will live until they die, unless they are lucky enough to hop onto a pile of sloth poo during the animal’s weekly bathroom trip.

But that is not the end of the story of sloth poop. Another species enters the picture. The third participants in this system are the Trichophilus algae, which live only on sloth fur. As we said, many of the moths die in the sloth’s fur. As they decompose, they release nitrogen and phosphorus into the fur, and the algae use that in their photosynthesis. The chlorophyll in the algae turns the sloth’s fur green, giving it natural camouflage in the tree canopy. In addition to giving the sloth a way to hide among the leaves that it eats, researchers have found small amounts of the algae in the stomachs of sloths. Perhaps the lipid-rich algae also provide additional nutrition that the sloth does not get from the leaves.

Completing the circle of life, the following week, when the sloth makes that dangerous trip to the ground, more pregnant moths plop into the precious pile of poo, and the cycle repeats.

It seems challenging to describe a completely natural way for this system to get started. The sloth could just drop its dung from the tree canopy and be safe. The Cryptoses choloepi moths, which live only on sloths, would not be needed. The sloths could probably survive without the Trichophilus algae that live in sloth fur and nowhere else on Earth. Does the story of sloth poop suggest a designed system, or did it just accidentally evolve over time?

Reference: popsci.com

May 15, 2026May 14, 2026

The Creativity of Chance

I’m sitting by my window, looking out at the beautiful trees, green grass, flowers, birds, groundhog, and squirrels, and I’m thinking about Darwinism. According to Darwinism, all living things have evolved from a common ancestor, a single-celled creature about four billion years ago. I’m thinking that it takes a lot of faith to believe in the creativity of chance.

People often cite similarities among living things as evidence that all life originated from a single common ancestor. In their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Norman Geisler and Frank Turek consider how much faith it takes to be a Darwinist. To believe in Darwinism, you must be able to explain the dissimilarity among living things. I think that may be more difficult than explaining the similarities.

Think about the variation among the millions of life forms. Geisler and Turek point out that if you believe in Darwinism, you must explain the dissimilarity between “the palm tree, the peacock, the octopus, the locust, the bat, the hippopotamus, the porcupine, the sea horse, the Venus flytrap, the human, and mildew.” The question is, how could those and all other species have descended from the first unicellular life by mere chance and without intelligent intervention?

As you ponder that, you must also realize that if you’re going to leave God out of the picture, how did nonliving chemicals organize into that original single-celled organism from which all life sprang into being? Furthermore, how can you explain the existence of the fine-tuned universe that makes life, and especially advanced life, possible? Could chance and time have created all of this, or does it require an intelligent Designer? Believing in the creativity of chance takes more faith than I have.

May 13, 2026May 11, 2026

Yawning is Good for Your Health

A new scientific study defines yawning as “a stereotyped orofacial-respiratory behavior characterized by a prolonged jaw gape and coordinated oropharyngeal movements.” We know what yawning is, and we know it can be impolite to yawn while listening to someone speak or perhaps during a sermon. But maybe yawning is good for your health, according to this new study.

Yawning is not confined to humans—mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and other vertebrates also yawn. We think of yawning as accompanied by taking a deep breath, but even marine mammals, including beluga whales, bottlenose dolphins, and dugongs, display a similar action, gaping their mouths even when they’re underwater so they can’t breathe. Yawning must be good for something.

According to the scientific report, most yawns appear to consist of an initial deep inspiration, a pause, and then a rapid expiration. It was suggested that yawning may play a role in regulating blood oxygen levels, brain thermoregulation, or attention/arousal. According to the study, it may also have something to do with cerebral metabolic waste clearance. In other words, it helps clear your brain, so yawning is good for your health.

The movement of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) contributes to waste removal in the brain. So, if CSF movement is critical to remove metabolic waste from the brain, how does yawning help with that movement? That was what the group’s research sought to find. They said, “The movement of the jaw and the act of inhaling can impact circulation within the skull.”

Furthermore, yawns may be coordinated by a brainstem central pattern generator (CPG), similar to those that control breathing and locomotion. Swallowing is also organized by CPG circuitry, and the researchers found that swallowing is often tied to yawning, since swallowing frequently occurs within seconds after a yawn.

The bottom line, as far as I can understand, is that yawning is good for your health because it helps clear the brain of waste materials. I presume that means when your brain is busy thinking, a yawn becomes necessary to clear out the waste and give room for your brain to keep on thinking. Perhaps if you’re yawning while reading the posts we present on this web page, we are stimulating your brain rather than putting you to sleep. If that is true, I am encouraged because while writing this, I found myself yawning.

I never cease to be amazed at the complexity of life and the human body that God designed, and yawning is just one more thing that amazes me.

Reference: sciencedirect.com

May 11, 2026May 10, 2026

The Amazing Bird Migrations

Spring and fall are busy times for bird migration. As I write this in May 2026, there are more birds migrating over the United States than there are people in this country. The amazing bird migrations provide evidence of design in nature, not of survival of the fittest by chance. That is especially true because those migrations often benefit other species more than the migrating birds, and especially migrations that go beyond where the birds could find warmer weather.

Birds migrate to find food, to find a place to reproduce, to avoid unpleasant weather, and even to benefit other species of life. In the Northern Hemisphere, birds travel north in the spring because there is an abundance of insects and plants that provide food. The weather is also suitable for raising chicks. When the weather becomes colder in the fall, they fly south to avoid freezing temperatures. As birds migrate, they benefit life in the various zones they pass through. Thankfully, many birds don’t migrate and remain in one area all year.

Factors that influence the number of birds traveling on any particular day include weather and light pollution. One factor that has dramatically affected the amazing bird migrations is sky glow. Lights from vehicles, homes, and businesses cause light pollution that has become a major problem for birds, especially in metropolitan areas. Excessive upward-directed light in the evening hours can cause birds to go off course and even run into buildings or other structures. We can help the birds by restricting stren oetlights to face the ground and keeping lighting to a minimum, especially during migration seasons.

how many birds are in the sky over the United States today and to learn more about the Audubon Society’s “Lights Out” program. It is essential for us to be good stewards of God’s gifts and to protect the birds from danger. Birds are essential to all other forms of life on Earth, including humans.

May 8, 2026May 4, 2026

Creating a Smell Map

It is easy to overlook the importance of the sense of smell. Smell affects human health and safety. The sense of smell plays an essential role in the taste of food. It can also warn us of spoiled or unsafe food by its rancid odor. Smell can give pleasure, as with the fragrance of flowers, or make us nauseated, as when we smell a foul odor. Fragrances can bring back pleasant memories. The loss of smell can cause depression. With those things in mind, researchers are creating a smell map.

Maps of the receptors for vision, hearing, and touch have been developed previously, but this research was the first to create a detailed map of the receptors for smell. The research began by studying the smell receptors in mice. The challenge in creating a smell map is that it is more complex than the other senses. There are only three main receptor types needed for color vision, but mice have 20 million olfactory neurons and more than 1,000 types of odor receptors that detect unique subsets of odor molecules.

Before creating a smell map, the prevailing theory was that the smell receptors were randomly placed. The study showed that smell receptors form horizontal stripes from the top of the nose to the bottom, and the order matches the brain’s olfactory bulb. Further study will explore human olfactory receptors to compare them with those in mice.

This research is important because it will help scientists develop therapies for people who have lost their sense of smell, as has sometimes been the case with COVID-19. As we learn more about how the sense of smell works, we see evidence of design. The bottom line is that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14). The design of life, and especially the human body, shows evidence of a Designer, not random chance.

Reference: Harvard Medical School hms.harvard.edu

May 5, 2026May 3, 2026

Honeybees Can Count

Yesterday, John Clayton followed up on my earlier post about bees. New research supports the idea that honeybees can count. This is despite the fact that a honeybee’s brain has fewer than one million neurons (compared to a human brain’s 86 billion neurons) and weighs less than one milligram (human brains weigh 1300-1400 grams).

Earlier research indicated that bees could count, add, subtract, and understand the concept of zero, but other scientists were skeptical of that data. The new research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, seems to support the earlier findings. Mirko Zanon, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Italy, said, “Our results show that [previous] criticism doesn’t hold when you consider the biology of the animal.”

Research showing that honeybees (Apis mellifera) can perform counting tests in the laboratory translates into useful skills in the field. For example, if honeybees can count, then counting flowers or petals could help them find the plants that offer the most nectar.

Processing numerical information by honeybees seems amazing when you consider the size of their brains. Learning the concepts of “greater than” and “less than” can be useful for the bee’s survival. The researchers in their report stated that “when viewed through a lens accounting for bee’s perceptual abilities, their behavioural responses observed in the numerical tasks investigated here are probably guided by actual numerosity rather than special cues.”

Of course, the report credited the numerical ability of honeybees to evolution, but couldn’t it be likely that the Creator placed in the tiny brains of these bees the neurological structure they need to survive?

References: popsci .com and Proceedings of the Royal Society B

May 4, 2026May 3, 2026

Secrets of the Bees in National Geographic

On April 28, 2026, Roland Earnst published an article about bees living in an upstate New York cemetery. The May 2026 issue of National Geographic carried an article titled “Secrets of the Bees,” which complements Roland’s article in several ways.

The complexity of hives is the first point. Bees design their hives to suit the climate where they live. Many have nests below ground, with some bees excavating as deep as three feet. A typical nest will have a vertical burrow with tunnels leading to areas waterproofed with glandular secretions, floral oils, or plant materials. The larvae develop in areas called brood cells, which are stocked with food. In dry areas, a bee called “Ulke’s Pebble Bee” will gather pebbles and bind them together with a mixture of saliva and mud, or resin if these materials are not available.

A second point in the National Geographic article that complements Roland’s article is that bees can learn. Bumblebees can learn to associate certain colors with rewards. Researchers have found that bees can look at a new landscape and navigate around the changes. In other words, bees are not robots that can be stopped by changing the landscape.

A third area of interest is that bees can figure out the most efficient way to reach a flower in a field, allowing them to maximize nectar gain. In describing “Secrets of the Bees,” the National Geographic writers use words like “hidden genius,” “brightest thinkers,” and “remarkable ways” to explain what bees can do. These are words that describe properties God would have given the bees, not accidents of chance. We still have a lot to learn from the smallest of God’s creatures.

Reference: “Secrets of the bees: Revealing the sneaky genius of nature’s b rightest thinkers” in National Geographic, May 2026