chameleon Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

October 4, 2023October 2, 2023

This Fish Sees With Its Skin

The many unique characteristics we see in animals enabling them to survive give evidence of God’s design and planning. Romans 1:20 says, “We can know there is a God through the things He has made.” Our daily posts here and on Facebook, as well as our Dandy Designs book series, show hundreds of examples. A new example is the hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus) living in the Atlantic Ocean reefs from the Carolinas to Brazil. You can almost say this fish sees with its skin.

Like many animals, the hogfish’s primary method of survival is camouflage. They hide by changing colors and altering skin patterns. Many animals, such as chameleons, squid, and cuttlefish, have chromatophores, which are pigment-bearing cells that can change color to match the environment. Hogfish also use chromatophores in their skin to change colors, but they have a layer of opsin, a light-sensing protein, under the chromatophore layer.

The hogfish moves through different kinds of background material as the reef has quite varied colors and textures with corals, sponges, and sediment. The fish can change its color to match the environment, but it can’t turn its head to see what color it is. The opsin layer acts as a primitive eye looking at the chromatophores to see that the color matches the surroundings. In that way, this fish sees with its skin.

The design of fish survival in a reef involves a wide variety of techniques. Some can swim rapidly, some can bury themselves in the bottom sediment, and others have immunity to stinging organisms. There are fish who can fly (glide), some can swim in schools, and some, like the Hogfish, can camouflage themselves. Together, they make the reef a place full of life and beauty. Perhaps that beauty will encourage humans to preserve the reefs of the world as places of great aesthetic worth.

Reference: Scientific American referenced in The Week for September 8/15, 2013.

March 9, 2021March 8, 2021

The Design of a Chameleon

Chameleons are lizards, and there are more than 200 species of them. The design of a chameleon displays impressive engineering.

Chameleons can change their color to show their mood, communicate, or blend with their environment to hide from predators or prey. They achieve the color change by adjusting crystals on their skin to reflect different wavelengths of light. Some chameleons can adjust their color according to the color-vision of the specific predator they want to avoid. That requires knowledge of what colors the predator can and cannot see.

Chameleons have eyes that move independently in ball sockets so they can look in two directions at once. They can also focus both eyes together for a 3-D view for accurately striking prey with their tongue. They have four toes on each foot, which they use to climb up or down with ease. Also, to help in climbing, most chameleons have prehensile tails to hang onto limbs.

Various chameleon species have adapted to live in rainforests and deserts. Since cold-blooded animals move slowly in low temperatures, you would expect a chameleon’s tongue to move more slowly when it’s cold. In that case, it would not be able to catch fast-moving insects in cold weather. However, their tongues don’t uncoil by muscle strength but by spring tension. Reeling the tongue back in is slower in cold temperatures, but that doesn’t matter for catching the prey.

The design of a chameleon speaks remarkably of a master Engineer-Designer.

March 30, 2020March 29, 2020

Four-Eyed Fish – Anableps

Throughout the natural world, we see special design features that allow animals to survive in environments that place unique demands. Chameleons have an eye-brain connection that enables the eyes to rotate independently of one another or work together when needed. Chameleons use their tongues to catch insects, but to capture their food, both eyes must work together to overcome depth perception issues. At the same time, chameleons are very vulnerable to predators, so their eyes must rotate independently to look in several directions at once. We find another example of unusual eyes in the genus of four-eyed fish, Anableps.

Anableps live in northern South America and Trinidad, where they swim in the surface waters of lakes and rivers. Near the surface, they are easy prey for birds, so they need to see above and below the water simultaneously. They appear to have four eyes, two above the water surface, and two below the surface. In reality, they are not separate eyes. The eyes are divided into two sections, separated by a band of tissue.

Each section of the Anableps eyes has two corneas, two pupils, a single egg-shaped lens, and one retina that is also divided. The portion of the eyes located above the water connects to a different section of the fish’s brain than the area below the waterline. These four-eyed fish are ideally suited to fill an ecological niche that no other fish can.

You might think that all fish could use this design, but every ecological niche has animals designed to inhabit and maintain that location. Anableps are unique, and that makes them popular aquarium fish. More importantly, this unique design speaks of God’s imaginative creativity in providing full use of every resource on planet Earth with creatures like the four-eyed fish, Anableps.

November 12, 2018November 8, 2018

Learn from the Animals

Learn from the Animals
We are frequently astounded by what animals can do. As science seeks solutions to problems such as having enough food, knowing how to avoid disasters, and solving medical problems, we frequently see the answers in the designed features of living things. There are many things we can learn from the animals.

How can we have enough food to feed everyone on this planet? One way is to take advantage of animals with high reproductive capacity. A female mackerel, for example, lays about 500,000 eggs at one time. We have relied on animals like cattle which have one offspring at a time, are environmentally unfriendly, and require massive energy to sustain. Many fish, arthropods and mollusks can reproduce massive numbers of offspring, need very little energy input, and give off little or no environmental hazards. Some of them even remove environmentally unfriendly materials.

Can we improve our vision and perhaps restore sight to people who are blind? Studies of the common dragonfly have shown that each eye has 30,000 lenses. Our one lens is limited as to what we can see. The way images are transmitted to the brain in animals allows multiple transmissions. We are learning from insects and chameleons how the brain can reconstruct a useful image from many separate images. A chameleon can move its eyes in different directions, and its brain can interpret the direction and identification of what each eye is seeing independently.

How can we make stronger materials? Beaver’s teeth are so sharp that Native Americans used them as knife blades. The structure of the tooth enamel in the beaver and how the teeth maintain their sharpness is an area where materials science researchers can learn from the animals.

Can we make better drones? Researchers are interested in how high-frequency wing beats can allow better control of flight. Tiny flies known as midges beat their wings over 1000 times a second – twice as fast as mosquitoes. We can even learn from the animals that are almost too small to see.

Examples like these challenge those who would attribute animal design to chance processes and survival of the fittest. The design engineering in the animal world suggests wisdom beyond that of humans. In Proverbs 8:5,22,35 wisdom speaks, “O you simple ones understand wisdom and you foolish ones, have an understanding heart. The Lord possessed me (wisdom) in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. For whoever finds me finds life and shall obtain the favor of the Lord.” Let us be wise as we copy the wise designs of the Creator.
–John N. Clayton © 2018
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