Personally, praying mantises give me the “creeps.” I am not like a friend of mine who, as a child, kept a praying mantis named, “Barbara” in his bedroom. To me, there has always been something sinister and austere about them. After reading about their reproductive habits, I had more reason to feel this way. As a part of the mating process, the male praying mantis is actually eaten by the female! If a male is lucky, the female will wait until during or after the ritual...
Read MoreAnts and Antifreeze
Pun intended, but ants really do produce antifreeze, too! Yep, it gets cold out there in the ground under a blanket of snow. Since the ants don’t have their own central heating systems, they need to have a way to keep from freezing during the winter. So the colder it gets, the more antifreeze is actually produced. Did this ability happen by chance over millions of years by mutation and natural selection as our evolutionist friends would claim? Scientists have long...
Read MoreSunbeam Hot Springs: A Lesson in Presumption
Sunbeam Hot Springs is a geothermally influenced spring located near Stanley, Idaho. Water emerges at the main vent at 72 degrees C (162 F) as it runs downhill before crossing under a highway and entering the Salmon River. Because I was working periodically in the area between October 2000 and April 2002, I had five seasonal opportunities to sample the aquatic organisms. In total, I found seven taxa of invertebrates, including five kinds of insects, one kind of water...
Read MoreBee Dances and Communication
Years ago, I saw a very interesting Moody Science film featuring the Dance of the Bees. Research first analyzed by Martin Lindauer 60 years ago showed that bees actually communicate by doing a type of energetic and vibrating waggle dance. This communicates the direction and the distance to a food source to other bees. (I wondered if they could actually talk but were just having fun doing some kind of charades at a bee party.) More recently, the Sept. 27, 2010, New York...
Read MoreHurrah for Ants!
Many of us are familiar with the children’s counting song, “The ants go marching one by one…” Scientists have now discovered that at least some species of ants do appear to be counting their steps when they go marching out in search of food. After training some desert ants to look for food in a specific location, scientists investigated how the ants could consistently locate the same source of food with seeming ease. It is known that ants will leave scent markers to guide...
Read MoreFly Genome Puzzles Evolutionary Scientists
Psalm 119:73 “Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding, that I may learn Your commandments.” Genes carry the biological information to make specific living things. Evolution says that simpler living things evolved first and more complex life evolved later. This would lead us to believe that more complex living things would have developed more genes. The creation approach suggests that each creature was designed with the genetic material...
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