Animals Archives - Page 22 of 56 - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

November 27, 2021November 19, 2021

Dung Beetles and Dirty Jobs

When you think of dirty jobs, think of dung beetles. They have the task of cleaning up the savannahs, grasslands, and forests where wild animals live. If you have had the experience of cleaning up after a dog or cat, just think about cleaning up after elephants. A dung beetle can move dung weighing 250 times as much as itself in one night’s work.

There are thousands of species of dung beetles. Some bury the dung where they find it, and some live in it. Others known as rollers take the excrement of elephants and other large animals and roll it into balls. Then they roll the balls to their nests to use as food for themselves and their offspring. They use their back legs to roll the balls, so they are not facing where they are going. Imagine rolling a ball that is larger than you in a straight line without looking where you’re going. So how do they do it?

These beetles can do their cleanup work in the daytime or at night, using the Sun or the Moon to navigate. An African species of dung beetles (Scarabaeus zambesianus) uses polarization patterns from moonlight to chart its direction. Another African species (Scarabaeus satyrus) can stay on course when there is no moonlight. South African researchers using a planetarium for a testing lab found that these beetles can go in a straight line using only the Milky Way on a moonless night. They are the only insects we know of that can use the galaxy to find their directions.

The idea of insects navigating by the Milky Way was a surprise to the scientists. I wonder Who thought of that idea first? (Hint: Perhaps the Designer of insects and the Milky Way.)

November 25, 2021November 19, 2021

Treating Animals as Humans

The evidence supports the concept that humans are created in the image of God. Humans have a concept of self that we don’t see in other forms of life. Humans are creative in art and music. All human populations share the capacity to worship. Even though that worship sometimes takes bizarre forms, it still recognizes a spiritual nature. The ability to be taught to think and to reason is not something we see in other life forms. The idea of existence after this life is peculiar to humans. With these things in mind, we should not be treating animals as humans.

Instincts built into the DNA of animals direct their behavior. Even when humans raise monkeys to be human, they ultimately revert to instinctive drives that sometimes culminate in violence. Animal “songs” have survival catalysts communicating territory or securing mates. Human trainers have attempted to teach “art” to animals, resulting in anthropomorphic interpretations by those trainers.

People should not cause animals to suffer or subject them to conduct that violates their nature. The biblical admonition to humans was to take care of the creation, not to abuse it. (See Genesis 2:15.) Treating animals as humans with human values does violence to the animals, depriving them of their instinctive behaviors and putting them in unrealistic environments. It is also a huge waste of resources.

In 2011, PETA sued SeaWorld on behalf of five captured orcas they said were protected under the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery. In 2015, a judge ruled that an orangutan named Sandra had “legal personhood,” which resulted in Sandra being moved to special quarters. Recently, on October 15, 2021, a federal judge in Cincinnati ruled that the descendants of hippos smuggled into Colombia by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar are considered “legal persons” under United States law. According to CBS News India, Pakistan, and Argentina have granted legal rights to animals.

God designed life, and we should treat all animals with respect, allowing them to live in the habitat where they were designed to live. However, that doesn’t require treating animals as humans.

References: Time magazine, November 8/15, 2021 page 18, and CBSnews.com.

November 23, 2021November 19, 2021

Animal Therapy Theories

Various mental health professionals and organizations use animal therapy in their practices. The animals soothe and calm hospital patients, provide emotional support, and even help in treating addictions. Therapy animals have included dogs, cats, pigs, horses, ducks, and other mammals and birds.

What can animals do to bring emotional comfort and stress relief to humans? Scientists are conducting clinical research to give objective answers to that question. In the meantime, we all know of subjective experiences where animals have given mental and emotional help to humans. There are also some cases where things did not work out so well, as when a petting zoo brought a bear cub to a university campus to soothe students during final exams. Unfortunately, the bear bit fourteen students, resulting in a rabies scare.

Scientists never want to rely on anecdotal evidence. Instead, they want to know if animal therapy works and why. Part of the importance of the scientific studies is that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has refused to cover the cost of service dogs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Insurance companies struggle with similar questions concerning doctor-prescribed service animals for patients with mental health issues.

While scientists struggle to discover the facts regarding animal therapy, many people claim to have received comfort, stress relief, and companionship from their pets. Some scientists have suggested what they call the biophilia hypothesis. According to that hypothesis, the desire to affiliate with animals results from our common evolution from lower life forms.

We suggest another explanation for the fact that humans relate so well to animals. We believe that the Creator gave us animals, especially mammals and birds, to be our companions and helpers. We relate to them, we learn from them, and they serve us in many ways. The truth is that humans have survived through the ages with help from mammals and birds. They are a gift from God.

November 20, 2021November 17, 2021

Ant Program in Action

You might call it intelligence in numbers. One ant by itself would be dysfunctional without any ability to survive. However, as part of a colony, everything changes. Ant colonies display an incredible amount of “intelligence” because of what we might call the “ant program.”

No ant, not even the queen, tells the individual ants what to do, yet they work together in an amazing way. Each ant reacts to chemical smells from other ants, food, waste, larva, and even intruders. They each leave chemical trails to which other ants respond. Each ant acts autonomously according to the environmental factors and the genetically encoded “ant program” built into them.

The result is an intelligent and efficiently functioning colony working together in complex behavior and problem-solving. Computers use programs to solve problems, and complex computer programs don’t write themselves. So the question we have to ask is, “Who wrote the genetically encoded ant program?” Every ant colony is evidence for a Master Programmer.

November 10, 2021November 9, 2021

God Has the Solution for Problems Humans Cause

When humans mess things up, God has the solution for problems humans cause. Since 2014, kelp forests and starfish have virtually disappeared from Alaska to Mexico. Sunflower sea stars were the main predators for sea urchins. The sea stars were severely affected by pollution, exploitation of marine resources, agricultural runoff, and climate change. Now scientists say they are functionally extinct. Since the sunflower sea stars are gone, the sea urchins have multiplied out of control.

Northern California has lost 95% of its kelp forests. The problem is that sea urchins are herbivores, and they eat the lower stems of kelp, causing the plants to die. Because of that, Fish, abalone, and various other marine animals that depend on the kelp forests have died. In many places, spiky sea urchins now carpet the seafloor, and locals have called those areas “urchin barrens.”

A partial solution to this problem is the sea otter, a keystone species and a major natural predator of sea urchins. Sea otters have a very high metabolism to keep them warm in the cold water, and it makes them ravenous consumers of sea urchins. In a single day, a sea otter can eat 25% of its body weight in food.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have found that sea otters are eating three times as many urchins as in 2014. In areas where sea otters are active, the kelp beds are starting to return. Once again, God has the solution for problems humans cause.

Reference: Discover magazine December 2021, page 18, and DiscoverMagazine.com.

November 9, 2021November 8, 2021

Role of Elephants in Desert Survival

There are many natural situations where, to a casual observer, an animal or plant appears to be a useless consumer of resources. As conservationists try to solicit funds to protect elephants, others say those animals have no useful function. Elephants consume vegetation which can cause hardships in periods of drought. However, as scientists study the role of elephants in desert survival, the need for these animals has become increasingly understood.

Savannah elephants live in eastern and southern Africa, with the highest densities in Botswana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa. In those regions, termites build huge mounds, and they bring a large number of elements and compounds to the surface as they dig. Eventually, the mounds flatten, creating depressions that fill with water during the rainy season. At that time, elephants come and dig up the nutrients they need as they wallow in the mud. They leave the area coated with soil which they carry away, leaving a deeper depression that eventually becomes a large water hole.

In addition to enlarging the water hole, the elephants deposit massive amounts of dung. The dung contains plant seeds that grow to become the start of vegetation around the water hole. That vegetation brings insects which, in turn, bring birds. Wading birds carry in fish eggs, bringing a wide variety of life to what was a desert. The oasis this process produces is critically essential to animal and plant life and humans.

The role of elephants in desert survival in Africa makes preserving them a key to the survival of all life in the region. Elephants have unique properties critical to the success of this system. Matriarch elephants remember where previous water holes were and lead their group back to dig and enlarge those holes, eventually making it an oasis. Some plants are correlated to bloom and provide seeds at the proper time for other forms of life. If the water hole dries up, some fish, amphibians, and reptiles can burrow into the soil and survive for up to five years, waiting for the next rain.

Earth’s design automatically produces all kinds of ecosystems, including deserts. God has designed life to adapt and exist, even in extreme environments, and the role of elephants in desert survival is a great example.

Reference: PBS network program on elephants, termites, and life in the dry African desert on November 5, 2021.

November 5, 2021November 4, 2021

Architectural Abilities of Honeybees

One of the evidences of design in the natural world is honeycomb construction by bees. For many years, engineers have noted that the hexagon is the strongest geometric shape. In geology, we see six-sided columns of basalt produced under ideal conditions inside the Earth. Visible examples of that appear in areas worldwide, such as Devils Tower in Wyoming, where erosion has exposed those columns. Scientists using automated measurements of thousands of honeycomb cells discovered the extraordinary architectural abilities of honeybees.

Many years ago, biologists questioned how bees learned to construct their honeycombs with a six-sided geometry. That shape gives the most storage space with efficient use of building materials. Any other geometric shape would collapse under the weight of the honey. Since a mistake would be lethal, trial and error seems to be an unsatisfactory explanation. Therefore, the genetic makeup of bees must include instructions to build their honeycombs with hexagons.

New studies show the architectural abilities of honeybees to be even more impressive. That is because the structure of the honeycomb is even more complicated than fitting hexagons together. The problem is that not all of the hexagons in a honeycomb can be the same size. Worker bees require a small six-sided structure, but drones require larger cells. However, all of these have to be fitted together into a single sheet in the hive. Researchers have found that bees create intermediate size hexagons to transition from one size to the other.

Also, the bees have to merge combs that are constructed from different starting points. Then, to align them, the bees build special cells with 4, 5, or even 7 sides. The writers of the research report said, “Unlike automatons building perfectly replicated hexagons, these building irregularities showcase the active role that workers take in shaping their nest and the true architectural abilities of honeybees.”

Queen Mary University entomologist Lars Chittka commented, “The hexagonal grid structure of a honeycomb–constructed by a leaderless collective of hundreds of bees–lends itself to speculation that robotic, innate behavior must be at work. But a simple robot does not have such a level of adaptability and rate of error recovery.”

Building even a simple robot is a real challenge to modern-day scientists and engineers. Building the bee’s genetic structure to include the ability to adapt the honeycomb to different needs is incredibly complex. The design of the genetic code for the architectural abilities of honeybees is an excellent testimony to God’s handiwork. God is a creator-engineer giving bees the ability to build honeycombs to accommodate their needs.

References: Scientific American November 2021 (page 19), and the original scientific report published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

November 4, 2021November 3, 2021

Anole Lizards Can Breathe Underwater

Researchers from the University of Toronto wanted to know how anole lizards could stay underwater for up to 18 minutes. To study them, the scientists went to Costa Rica and captured lizards in 32 species of the Anolis genus. They found that anole lizards can breathe underwater.

Their study showed that all species of anole lizards breathe air trapped around their snouts while submerged. The skin of these lizards is hydrophobic (water repellent) and traps a thin film of air between the water and the skin. Because of the lizard’s design, the trapped air ends up in a bubble over its nose. When the lizard inhales, the air bubble deflates. When the lizard exhales, the film traps the air around its nose until the anole breathes in again. You could say the lizard has a built-in “scuba-diving” system allowing it to breathe underwater.

This is another example of very specialized equipment built into living things allowing life to exist in challenging environments. The more we learn about the creation, the more we see specialized systems that enable planet Earth to support an incredible variety of life.

Anole lizards can breathe underwater, and the various species share this survival design. The researchers call it “macroevolutionary convergence.” We call it a shared body design for survival with a built-in design for knowing how to use it. Specialized equipment and behavior show evidence of intelligence in the design of the different varieties of life we see around us. As Romans 1:20 says, “We can know there is a God through the things He has made.”

Reference: American Scientist, November/December 2021, page 336. The scientific article is published in the journal Current Biology.

November 2, 2021November 1, 2021

Ducklings Swimming in Single-File – It’s Because of Fluid Dynamics

We live on the riverbank, and many geese, ducks, and swans swim by our house daily. I have always been curious about why waterfowl tend to swim in a line each time I see ducklings swimming in single-file behind their mother. Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in the U.K. have applied a mathematical and numerical model to find an explanation.

For example, the swimming of the mother duck sets up an interference pattern reducing the wave-drag and propelling the trailing duckling forward as it surfs the wave. In this way, the lead duckling swims in the “sweet spot” behind its mother. With the rest of the ducklings swimming in single-file, the “wave-riding” benefit carries further. After the third duckling in line, a “delicate dynamic equilibrium” is reached in which each duckling acts as a “wave passer,” passing on wave energy to the next one behind without loss of energy.

The lead author of the study is Zhiming Yuan, and he gave the researcher’s description of this design by saying, “It’s so beautiful.” He thinks that there could be applications for maritime technology with shipping firms designing their vessels so they can travel like ducks in a row to reduce fuel consumption.

It seems that evolutionary natural selection would have terminated this arrangement. An eagle wanting a duck or goose meal would have little trouble picking off ducklings swimming in single-file behind their mother. If the birds were moving in random arrangement around their mother, it should be far more difficult to focus on and pick off one of them. Survival of the fittest doesn’t seem to apply to the behavior of the birds that use a single file approach to travel.

We see that this design is built into the DNA of these birds to provide conservation of energy which is critical to their survival. When you look anywhere in the natural world, you will see extraordinary design to allow living things to exist and thrive.

Reference: The Week, November 5, 2021 page 21. You can find the original scientific report HERE.

October 29, 2021October 28, 2021

What the Brain Allows Us to Do

Of all of the parts of your body that radiate design and complex structure, the brain is probably the most amazing. When we compare what the brain allows us to do and human efforts to build a computer to duplicate those things, we realize the incredible nature of the brain’s creation. No computer can do everything your brain does and probably never will.

A big question in understanding the brain is what controls intelligence. For example, a blue whale has a giant brain, almost five times as big as ours, but there is no evidence that they have superior intelligence. However, brain size is a factor in how much energy it uses. Our brain is about 2% of our body weight, but it consumes 20% of our energy.

Studies have shown large variations in brain size within the bird family. For example, ravens have bigger brains than the much larger ostriches, and they also demonstrate greater intelligence. On the other hand, some fish have tiny brains. For instance, bony-eared assfish have the smallest brain-to-body mass ratio of any vertebrate, but they require only a few simple functions to survive in their deep ocean environment.

Research has shown that different parts of animal brains are different sizes depending on the animal’s needs. For example, owls have a more extensive section of their brains related to sight than other birds that don’t hunt at night. Crows and parrots have the largest brain size compared to the bodyweight of all birds. They are also considered to be the most intelligent of all birds. It is quite clear, however, that brain size is not a primary factor in intelligence. On average, male human brains are larger than female brains, and no one would suggest that males are more intelligent.

The bottom line is that brains are tailor-made to fit what the individual needs to survive. Also, the critical factor isn’t the size of the brain but the size of the brain section the animal requires for survival. In humans, the ability to create art and music does not seem to be related to the brain. Mentally challenged humans frequently create marvelous works of art and compose beautiful music. The human capacity to worship and to believe there is more to existence than this life do not seem to be related to any brain response.

What the brain allows us to do is an incredible demonstration of God’s wisdom and design. However, it is not our brains but our spiritual make-up that makes humans different from other living things. We are created in the image of God, allowing us to do things and understand things that are beyond all other life on Earth.

Reference: American Scientist, November/December 2021 pages 352-359.