Plants Archives

July 28, 2023July 27, 2023

Predators Are Essential for Balance

Predators Are Essential for a Balanced System - Hammerhead Shark — Hammerhead Shark

We sometimes get letters from people who have been traumatized by seeing a television program where a carnivore slaughters an innocent animal. We have been conditioned by Disney-type movies such as Bambi or Nemo, showing cute and cuddly animals. The idea of them being eaten by other animals is not on our radar and certainly not what we want small children to see. But, in the real world, predators are essential.

The reality is that the design built into the living system involves population control and that design is far more humane than what happens without it. Predators are essential because when animals become so numerous they cannot find enough to eat, the result is cruel and painful.

There are countless examples of what happens when predators are removed from an area. Years ago, the deer population was in serious trouble in Indiana’s Brown County State Park. The state finally decided to allow a hunt because the deer were eating all of the park’s vegetation. When scientists studied the deer that hunters culled from the population, some 12-year-old deer weighed less than 50 pounds. Their immune system had been compromised because they were emaciated due to a lack of food. The wolves and other predators that had kept the deer population in balance with the food supply had been removed from the park, and the deer suffered as a result.

Animals are not humans in costumes. They do not have a concept of self, and death is not cruel. Starvation, pain, and disease are rare in populations controlled by predators. To vilify God based on animal predation is an unfortunate choice based on ignorance since predators are essential for a balanced system.

It is interesting that most large predators have their numbers limited by low birth rates and small numbers of offspring. Also, many predators’ numbers are limited because larger predators prey on them. Hammerhead sharks limit dangerous shark populations in the ocean. Seventy-one percent of the hammerhead’s diet consists of other sharks.

Designing a world that balances the environment and the animals it supports is incredibly difficult. Humans often upset the balance in nature, and some cases require replacing a predator they have removed from an ecosystem. Caring for all of God’s creatures is essential for our own health and survival.

Data on Hammerheads from “Sharkfest” PBS television special 7/25/23.

July 20, 2023July 19, 2023

Non-Native Species Invasion

As we look at the flora and fauna of our world, we see a beautifully designed system. Plants and animals sustain each other in a balanced network of life, but problems arise when humans do things that upset that balance. One way we do that is by accidentally or intentionally causing a non-native species invasion with no natural predator or forager. The species then has no control factor to balance it, and plant growth or animal reproduction becomes out of control.

An example of a non-native species invasion is the kudzu plant. This vine can grow up to a foot per day and is known as “the vine that ate the south.” It has taken over parks, roadsides, and forests in some areas. Kudzu vines wrap themselves around the trunks of native trees, out-competing their host for sunlight and even nutrients by girdling its bark and strangling the tree.

Kudzu is native to Asia and some Pacific islands, but people brought it to North America as a decorative plant in the 1870s. As late as the 1940s, the U.S. government urged farmers to plant it to prevent soil erosion, and people promoted it as a fast-growing plant to shade porches. The consequences of human actions have become evident, costing millions of dollars.

One of the worst U.S. invaders is the inappropriately named tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima ), native to areas of China and Taiwan. It was brought to the United States in 1784 as a decorative tree. However, its habits of sending out shoots, known as suckers, colonizing areas, and suppressing competition by producing chemicals that inhibit the growth and reproduction of other plants. This non-native species invasion also creates an objectionable odor and hosts another invasive species, the spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula). Eradicating this “tree of hell,” as some call it, is difficult because if you cut it down, it will quickly regrow from new shoots.

All of these invasive species serve a purpose in their native lands, where they fit into the balance of the natural world. The problem comes when humans upset God’s balanced system. In many ways, humans have not been good stewards of the job God assigned us to “rule over” the Earth (Genesis 1:26) and “work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15).

References: Wikipedia- Kudzu in the U.S., Tree of Heaven, Spotted Lanternfly

July 19, 2023July 19, 2023

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

It’s known as the Sagan standard and abbreviated ECREE. Carl Sagan, an American scientist, and agnostic, hosted the PBS program Cosmos in the 1980s. He said in the series, “I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He was talking about claims that aliens from space had visited Earth. But we can apply the principle to more than alien visitations.

The truth is that Sagan did not originate the ECREE concept. He just popularized it on television. The idea had been previously expressed many times by others. Even Thomas Jefferson described it in a letter he wrote in 1808 about the existence of meteorites, but he was much more wordy. (He used about three dozen words instead of Sagan’s five.)

What does the Sagan ECREE standard mean? It tells us that when we make an extraordinary claim, we must back it up with extraordinary evidence. How about the extraordinary secularist claim that everything we see came from nothing by means of nothing? If matter, energy, time, and space all originated at the “big bang,” and nothing existed before that, where is the extraordinary evidence to back up that claim? Could an eternal God existing outside of time and space be a better explanation for the universe?

If one claims that life originated from non-living chemicals without intelligent guidance, what is the extraordinary evidence for that? Even if science succeeds in creating life from non-living chemicals in the laboratory (and they are far from doing that), it would merely prove that intelligence can create life from non-life. That is what the Bible has said for thousands of years.

Once life got its start, what is the evidence that it evolved from species to species until it reached homo sapiens? We don’t see any extraordinary experimental or fossil record evidence of that either. To prove that natural selection acting on random mutations could accomplish a task that defies the second law of thermodynamics requires extraordinary evidence, which we don’t have.

We agree with the Sagan standard that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). The question is, does all that we see in the universe and on our planet give extraordinary evidence of unguided random chance or design by an intelligent Creator?

Reference: Wikipedia

July 18, 2023July 17, 2023

The Salvinia Effect and Biomimicry

Scientists have made many helpful discoveries by observing things in nature. Everything from airplane wings to Velcro originated by imitating something observed in the natural world. The name of this process is biomimicry, and an example is the salvinia effect.

Salvinia is a genus of ferns that float on the water. This plant has a layer of microscopic hairs that grow from a single shaft. The four hairs from the single shaft are connected at the tips, giving them a shape that resembles an eggbeater. The hairs and the leaf surface repel water (hydrophobic), but the tips of the hairs attract water (hydrophilic). This traps a layer of air on the leaf’s surface, eliminating any drag or pull the water might have on the leaves. This stabilized air layer on a surface submerged in water is known as the salvinia effect.

The salvinia effect opens new opportunities for biomimicry. Aircoat Project, funded by the European Union, has developed a synthetic coating that mimics this effect. Imagine the money saved if a coating for a ship’s hull could reduce drag by 30-40%, saving fuel. This coating could also reduce ship noise, which is detrimental to aquatic species such as porpoises. In effect, the ship would be floating on a very thin layer of air.

In biomimicry, such as the salvinia effect, we learn from what God has already created and find ways to apply that knowledge to solve some of our problems. Because there are so many examples of specialized and highly sophisticated design in the world around us, the future looks bright if we preserve God’s gifts and learn from them.

Reference: Motortrend Magazine, August 2023, page 22, and Wikipedia

July 3, 2023July 1, 2023

Human Actions Lead to Wildfires

In our part of the country, people will remember the summer of 2023 as the “summer of smoke.” Canadian wildfires combined with wind directions have brought heavy smoke into our area. The smoke has been so dense that a friend living in Chicago told me he could not see across the street – a distance of about 20 yards. In the past, we personally experienced California wildfires and saw their massive damage. The message we need to understand is that human actions lead to wildfires.

God designed the natural world to prevent massive fires from developing. When we allow brush to accumulate, lightning, human carelessness, or arson starts a fire, it will explode into a conflagration of massive proportions. The role of grazing animals is one way the natural world has been designed to prevent these huge fires.

Ireland is a rainy country, but in 2021, wildfires burned near Dublin for six weeks. The fuel for those explosive fires is a flowering plant called gorse. It grows in dense thickets and is highly flammable when it dries in late summer. The removal of an indigenous goat breed known as old Irish goats allowed the heathland to become overgrown. The result was annual fire outbreaks.

By introducing the old Irish goats back to the area where the gorse grows, the plant biomass is no longer a fuel source for the fires. An organization called the “Old Irish Goat Society” (OIGS) has been involved in a three-year project to reintroduce the endangered goat breed into areas suffering the threat of wildfires. One obvious risk in today’s world is that the goats will also eat desirable plants. In the past, carnivores prevented that from happening by limiting goat populations. The OIGS prevents that problem by equipping the goats with GPS colors that set off an alarm when the goats wander too far.

God built into the creation a variety of means of preventing wildfires. Once again, human actions lead to wildfires by altering the original system, which included grazing animals. Yellowstone National Park has similar results with elk herds. We must learn to allow the controlling agents that God built into the original system.

Reference: “Meet the Firefighting Goats of Dublin” in Discover magazine for July/August 2023, pages 10-11.

June 6, 2023June 1, 2023

Convergent Evolution and Carcinization

When unrelated species of animals or plants have common features, evolutionary biologists call it “convergent evolution.” There are many examples, such as:
* Dolphins and bats use echolocation to find food.
* Titan arum and rafflesia plants use putrid odor to attract pollinators.
* Nightingales and humpback whales sing similar songs just for beauty.

Those are only a few of the vast number of examples that scientists explain as convergent evolution. You can probably think of others. For example, bats, birds, and insects all have wings, but they are not related. In addition, unrelated venomous or poisonous creatures often wear bright colors as a warning, for example, snakes, frogs, and insects. Usually, the convergent features of various animals and plants serve an obvious purpose for the species’ survival.

Perhaps the most repeated convergence appears in the crab-like body shape. A crab has a flat, rounded shell and a tail that tucks under its body. Evolutionary biologists say that body plan has “evolved” at least five times. Scientists even have a name for this phenomenon. They call it “carcinization,” but they can only guess why it happened.

The result of carcinization is that many unrelated crustaceans resemble crabs. As a result, we often call them crabs even though they are not true crabs. A familiar example is the so-called king crab. Crab-shaped animals come in a wide range of sizes and live in various habitats, from the oceans to the mountains. So, with these creatures living in diverse ecosystems, scientists have difficulty explaining why they evolved the same body plan. Some suggestions include the tucked-under tail providing greater safety from predators or the body shape allowing them to move sideways.

We have a suggestion of why the crab shape, or carcinization, shows up in so many different crustaceans. Rather than convergent evolution, the common traits can be explained by a common Creator. That would explain why these creatures have the DNA building blocks for crabbiness – oops, I mean crab body shape.

May 30, 2023May 30, 2023

The Careless Use of Chemicals to Control Pests

One of the significant challenges we face is dealing with biological pests. In the United States, the accepted pest control method is using chemicals to kill anything that affects crop growing, spreads diseases, or just annoys us. We use weed and vegetation killers, insect sprays, chemical treatments for trees, and chemicals for the soil to make our lives more comfortable and increase the food supply. Unfortunately, the problems caused by the careless use of chemicals to control pests become more evident as we see the collateral damage and the cost of chemical production and distribution.

The current battle over the potential cancer-causing effect of Roundup reminds us of the health damage Agent Orange caused for military personnel in Vietnam. On a personal note, my younger brother died from the effects of Agent Orange that he was exposed to during his military service. We need to realize that God has given us tools to control negative environmental influences without the careless use of chemicals.

Studies show that the collateral damage from air pollution and ground-level ozone includes increased heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and dementia. Even aggression among animals and humans increases when pollution levels rise. For example, a study of 70,000 U.S. cases showed more people were bitten by dogs on smoggy days.

American foulbrood is a bacterial disease that has wiped out many broods of honey bees and is apparently catalyzed by pesticides used on crops that bees pollinate. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved an oral honeybee vaccine against the disease. But, again, this is an example of collateral damage from the careless use of chemicals to control pests.

Natural pest control avoids collateral damage. For example, vineyard owners near Cape Town, South Africa, use a group of domesticated Indian runner ducks to eat the snails and bugs that infect their vines. In addition to eating the pests, the ducks leave natural fertilizer to nourish the vines.

People use bats to eat insect pests in various places worldwide. Locust swarms are not an issue where bat populations are large. Insecticides can cause the death of songbirds, and as the bird populations decline, insect swarms increase, creating more problems. Even removing fish and frog populations harms pest control, as fish and frogs eat many insects and their larvae.

God has built pest controls into our planet, but humans often upset the balance. Restoring natural controls is within our reach, but people often believe the careless use of chemicals to control pests is easier and more profitable. Unfortunately, ignoring God’s design leads to health problems linked to the chemicals we dump on our land and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.

References: “What pollution does to you” in the March 25, 2023, issue of Science News, “The list of diseases linked to air pollution is growing” in Science News, September 2017, and Solutions, a publication of the Environmental Defense Fund.

April 27, 2023April 24, 2023

Waste of Food and Resources

One of the great tragedies of American culture today is the incredible waste of food and resources. People in many places around the world are surviving on less than 1000 calories per day, and starvation is killing vast numbers. Over a third of the food produced in the United States is never eaten. On average, Americans throw away a pound of food per person daily. The Environmental Protection Agency says the water and energy wasted in the United States in a year would supply more than 50 million homes.

The problem is not just the waste of food and resources but also how we use the land to produce food. The University of Oxford and Global Change Data Lab tell us that 50% of the world’s habitable land and 70% of freshwater goes to growing food and raising livestock. So when we throw away food, we also waste land and water resources. Three-fourths of the global ocean and freshwater pollution comes from agriculture. Greenhouse gas emissions from one year of food waste in the United States alone are equivalent to the emissions from 42 coal-fired power plants.

God has provided us with all the resources we need to feed the world’s population, but corporate greed, selfishness, ignorance, and a lack of concern for others cause the problem of world hunger. In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus described judgment based on how we conduct ourselves in meeting the needs of others. The first thing Jesus mentions is that providing food for others is a responsibility of His followers (verses 35 and 42). One way we can do that is by avoiding the waste of food and resources God has given us and becoming leaders in the war against hunger. By living in obedience to Christ, we witness the reality of God to the world.

Reference: The Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter for February 2023 has several tips for reducing food waste, including “the truth about date stamps” on food that cause people to throw away food that could be eaten.

April 26, 2023April 27, 2023

Eliminating Pigments in Paint

What if we could reduce environmental problems by eliminating pigments in paint? Creating colorful paint without pigments is possible by copying something found in the natural world. For example, butterflies, birds, fish, and cephalopods use structural color to create their dazzling beauty. Light, rather than pigments, creates structural color.

Debashis Chanda and colleagues at the University of Central Florida have researched eliminating pigments in paint by using structural color. Pigment colors are artificially synthesized molecules, requiring different chemicals for each color. Structural color involves producing a geometrical arrangement of two colorless materials to make any color of the rainbow.

Chandra’s work produces a plasmonic paint using nanoscale structural arrangements of aluminum and aluminum oxide, both of which are colorless. Structural color controls the reflection, scattering, or absorption of light based on the geometrical configuration of the nanostructures. The research has placed these structural color flakes in a commercial binder to produce all the colors visible to the human eye.

Unlike pigment color, structural color never fades. Another advantage is that it reflects infrared radiation, so the material under the paint can stay 25 to 30 degrees F cooler than with chemical paint. Also, plasmonic paint is lighter weight because it can produce saturated colors with a thinner paint layer. In addition, since the colors will not fade, there may not be a need to repaint as often. Finally, eliminating pigments in paint reduces chemical substances that can cause environmental impacts.

With these advantages, structural color plasmonic paint may be the paint of the future. Interestingly, structural color is another thing we learn from studying the natural world. Often the colors we see in living things come from structural color rather than pigments. This is one more example of the intelligence God built into the world. We continue to learn exciting new ways to improve people’s lives by mimicking what God has already done. Like velcro, penicillin, bird wings, and lizard lungs, we are blessed by copying God’s design.

References: National Science Foundation Reports and the journal Science Advances

April 20, 2023April 20, 2023

Spring Green Testifies of God

I have been admiring the beautiful colors of the blossoms on our fruit trees and the flowering dogwoods. Spring brings new life to the natural world. Everything changes daily as the bulb plants wake up and emerge from the ground. Yet, even with all the beautiful colors, I enjoy spring green.

Green is a very relaxing color. The new leaves on the trees transform them from ghost-like stalks to luxurious, living umbrellas ready to provide shade from the summer heat. But, have you ever noticed that the green of tree leaves seems more vibrant in the spring than in summertime? There is a reason for that. It isn’t just your imagination.

Leaves are green because of the chlorophyll they contain. That amazing chemical makes it possible for plants to take energy from the Sun, moisture from the ground, and carbon dioxide from the air to make sugars that power their growth. We call that extremely complex process photosynthesis, and we have discussed that before on this website. The chlorophyll is contained in chloroplasts in the leaves. The chloroplasts absorb light, but they use more of the higher energy blue and red wavelengths and reflect much of the green. When we see spring green leaves, they contain fewer chloroplasts, so they absorb less light, making the green leaves appear bright and vibrant.

Chloroplasts multiply as the season wears on, so the leaves absorb more light. Also, the cuticles, or outer layer of the leaves, and the cell walls in the leaves become thicker. Those factors, which are part of the leaf’s maturing process, cause it to appear darker. I wonder if we also become less conscious of the green after we have seen it for a few weeks. When the dark tree trunks of winter become hidden by beautiful green leaves, we take notice. Our attention changes when we have seen the spring green and become overwhelmed by the summer.

In autumn, when the chloroplasts fade, the vibrant colors of other chemicals in the leaves catch our attention. Spring green and autumn gold and red can jar us into realizing the beauty of the world. However, we should not need sudden changes to make us conscious of the beauty of God’s wonders all around us. Evidence for God is there if we are willing to look. “For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20 CSB).