Clever Ant Farmers Harvest Seeds

Pogonomyrmex barbatus is a close relative of P. badius. Image courtesy of Steve Jurvetson, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).





Joel Kontinen

According to the Darwinian story, chimps and other big mammals should certainly be much smarter that tiny ants who have a minuscule brain.

However, ants seem to defy this dogma at almost every turn. Even evolutionists believe that they created an elaborate farming system some “25 million years” ago.

Ants are living fossils that haven’t changed in “100 million years".

Today’s ants seem to know basic mathematics, and are able to build impromptu bridges and living rafts, for instance.

New research discloses yet another surprise. As New Scientist puts it,

“Florida harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex badius, have developed a clever farming strategy to do so – they plant seeds, wait for them to germinate and then eat the soft spoils.”

The article goes on to explain just how clever the ants are. While they cannot crack up the hard seeds, they have found a way to get at the nutritious food:

“Germination … splits the tough husk, making the seed contents available as food for the ants. A single large seed may have nutritional value of 15 smaller seeds, so it makes sense to collect it and wait for it to crack open. Seeds from various species germinate at different times, which may give the ants a steady supply of their ‘crop’ ”.

The Bible describes ants as very industrious creatures and it definitely is true.

Source

Simičević, Vedrana. 2017. Harvester ants farm by planting seeds to eat once they germinate. New Scientist (13 January).

Bats Use Smart Sat-Nav Neurons to Find Their Way

Image courtesy of Arpingstone, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Fruit bats have a smart navigation system that tells them where to go. They have brain cells that give them “their distance and angle to a location,” as a Nature news article puts it.

The article goes on to say:

“Egyptian fruit bats navigate their angle and distance of flight to specific destinations using special vector neurons.

Bats have brain cells that keep track of their angle and distance to a target, researchers have discovered. The neurons, called ‘vector cells’, are a key piece of the mammalian’s brain complex navigation system.”

Many animals, such as monarch butterflies, jellyfish, turtles, pigeons, bumblebees and robins, have amazingly smart navigation skills.

And bats can fly really fast.

What do these skills tell us? They should remind us of the Creator:

“For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20, NIV).

Source:

Abbott, Alison. 2017. Sat-nav neurons tell bats where to go. Nature news (12 January).

The Elephant’s Trunk: An Elegant Multi-Purpose Tool

The elephant's trunk is an elegant multi-purpose tool.




Joel Kontinen

The elephant’s trunk is an elegant multi-purpose tool. It can move and pick up both huge objects and tiny ones and anything in between as well.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta featuring a captive African elephant called Kelly shows just how effective this tool is.

They offered Kelly four different kinds of food, of different sizes – powdered bran, cubed bran, cubed swede and cubed celery – and noticed that the elephant was able to change the shape of her trunk and exert just the force needed to pick up the food.

New Scientist gives us some details:

“Kelly’s secret, it turns out, was her ability to create a kink at any point along her 2-metre-long trunk that would provide exactly the right downward force to grip each size of food item.

The kink acted like a joint that subdivided her trunk into two sections: a long section that supported the weight of the trunk and a short tip pointing vertically downwards for dexterous gripping.”

Intelligent solutions do not appear out of thin air. They have to be designed.

And the elephant’s trunk seems to be designed amazingly well:

“Kelly could reduce the downward force for particularly delicate object handling by making the vertical part of her trunk shorter – and increase the force by making the vertical section longer.

In other words, Kelly had the ability to fine-tune how much force to apply by altering the position of the ‘kink’ in her trunk.”

Many other features in animals bear the hallmarks of intelligent design. A recent study looked at the zebra’s tail, which is also a very effective tool.

Other examples include the Saiga antelope’s air-conditioning nose, the penguin’s anti-free feathers and an anti-crash system in birds, to mention just a few.

Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2017. The trunk trick that lets elephants pick up almost anything. New Scientist (9 January).

Intelligently Designed Zebra Tail Is An Amazingly Effective Fly Swatter

The zebra tail can swing really fast.




Joel Kontinen

How do zebras and giraffes keep flies and mosquitoes away? They resort to a clever trick: they swing their tails “three times faster than a gravity-driven pendulum.”

Writing in Science, Elizabet Pennisi goes on to say:

“The tail works like a double pendulum in that it swishes from where it sticks out of the butt and then from another pivot point where the bone and skin part of the tail ends and the hair begins … Because of that second pivot, the tip can swing at a different speed or even direction than the rest of the tail. This flexibility enables the animal to interrupt its swishing and use both pivot points to take aim and powerfully swat the intruder before it has a chance to bite.”

God knew that in a fallen world zebras needed to have a mechanism for protecting themselves from insects.

The tail is not the zebra’s only defensive weapon. Its stripes also keep insects away, making it difficult for them to find a safe landing place.

Source:

Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2017. Watch a zebra turn its tail into a surprisingly effective fly swatter. Science (6 January).

Strong, Smart and Small: Tiny Molecules Can Build Huge Structures

Plants can be amazingly strong.





Joel Kontinen

Some materials found in nature can be astonishingly strong. Just think of a spider’s web, for instance. A recent example is a smart “glue” that keeps a plant’s cell walls together.

Science Daily summarises the findings of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications:

“Molecules 10,000 times narrower than the width of a human hair could hold the key to making possible wooden skyscrapers and more energy-efficient paper production, according to research… The study, led by a father and son team at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge, solves a long-standing mystery of how key sugars in cells bind to form strong, indigestible materials.”

Cellulose and xylan are the most common large molecules or polymers that abound in the cell walls of plants.

Researchers knew that these molecules could somehow stick together to form strong cell walls, but until now they did not understand how they did it.

Professor Paul Dupree of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, says:

“Cellulose induces xylan to untwist itself and straighten out, allowing it to attach itself to the cellulose molecule. It then acts as a kind of 'glue' that can protect cellulose or bind the molecules together, making very strong structures.”

Which evolved first?

It seems that this is yet another of the chicken or egg dilemmas that Darwinian evolution can’t explain.

We have just begun to understand the mysteries of trees and the amazing properties of the creatures that use their produce for food.

Source:

University of Cambridge. 2016. Glue' that makes plant cell walls strong could hold the key to wooden skyscrapers." Science Daily. (21 December).