Amazing Creation

The Wacky Wombat

Wes Bredenhof
Common Wombat on Maria Island, Tasmania

Back when I was a missionary in British Columbia, we had a friend visit from Australia.  I asked him, “Have you ever seen a bear in the wild?”  He hadn’t.  “Would you like to see one?”  He certainly did, but expressed his doubts whether I could just conjure up a wild bear for him.  We drove for about 15 minutes north and arrived at the fish-counting weir on the Babine River.  And sure enough, as always at that time of year, there were grizzly bears about, fishing for spawning salmon.  Our Aussie friend was duly impressed. 

Now if you were to visit our part of Australia today, I’d ask you, “Have you ever seen a wombat in the wild?”  The wombat is as close as we get to a bear here in Tasmania.  We’d have to drive a little bit, but there are some spots here where I can guarantee you’d see one — places like Maria Island, Cradle Mountain, or Narawntapu.  And there are plenty of other places where, even if we didn’t see an actual wombat, we could definitely see evidence of them. 

The main evidence you’d find would be their droppings.  They’re rather distinctive.  Wombat droppings are cubic, you see.  Yep, they’re the only animals in the world that poop cubes.  How does a wombat manage this feat?  According to a recent study of wombat intestines, rather than being consistent like most animals, wombats have areas of varying thickness and stiffness.  The droppings go through grooved tissues and irregular contractions and this produces cubes.  Now not all wombat droppings are perfect cubes, but apparently the more cubic they are, the healthier the wombat.

When most people think of marsupials, they think kangaroos.  However, wombats are marsupials too.  The wombat’s pouch faces backwards between its legs.  So you could very well see a momma wombat wandering away with a baby wombat peeking out from the pouch. 

Wombat on Maria Island, Tasmania

Wombats are also renowned road kill in Tasmania and elsewhere.  Adult wombats can be a meter long and weigh in at 35 kg or 77 lbs.  They are like little bears.  If you hit one with your vehicle, you’re going to feel it and it’s going to do some damage.  This is because a wombat is not only large and heavy, but also built tough.  Wombats may look soft and cuddly, but they’ve been designed like a tank.  It’s especially their backsides that present a formidable wall – they have four fused bony plates.  They use their backsides for defence and mating.  When they’re in their burrows and an animal threatens to invade, they’ll just stick their bony butts out.  They’ve been known to crush their enemies with their ample derrieres.  Male and female wombats bite each other in their solid back ends as part of their mating rituals – and are none the worse for it.

Other wacky wombat facts:

  • Baby wombats hiccup when they’re stressed.
  • Wombat digestive processes include fermentation, a process which lasts weeks.
  • Some early European arrivals mistook the wombat for a badger.  Hence Tasmania has a “Badger Beach” on its north coast. 
  • Wombats create lengthy and complex burrow systems.  In 1960, a 15 year old Australian schoolboy began exploring wombat burrows by crawling through them.  Peter Nicholson’s research is still used today.
  • There are three species of wombats:  the common, the northern hairy-nosed, and the southern hairy-nosed.  All are only found in Australia (in the south and east).
  • The Latin name of the common wombat is vombatus ursinus – literally, “wombat bear.”  If you know your Heidelberg Catechism history, Zacharias Ursinus’ original German surname was Baer (=Bear).   

God has certainly put fascinating creatures on this earth.  Wombats are among them, animals that illustrate our Maker’s creative genius.  Here we have an animal that looks a little bear, but could hardly be more different than a bear.  I can’t help but exclaim with the psalmist, “O LORD, how manifold your works!  In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24).                          

The Eccentric Echidna

Wes Bredenhof

For the last few years I’ve been privileged to live in Tasmania, Australia’s smallest and arguably most beautiful state.  One of the wonderful things about Tasmania is the opportunity to regularly encounter unique wildlife.  We have some of the most interesting creatures in the world and with many of them, you don’t have to travel far to meet them. 

For example, I take a daily walk which brings me through a nearby bushland reserve.  During the warmer months, I frequently encounter the oddly fascinating echidna.  I’ll be walking along and an echidna will be foraging for food in the dirt at the side of the track.  If I walk up slowly from behind, usually I won’t be noticed.  But if I am noticed, the echidna doesn’t scurry away like most creatures might.  Instead, it freezes in place, tucks its head down and hopes for the best. 

If you’ve never seen one, an echidna is best described as a cross between a porcupine and a hedgehog.  It has quills like a porcupine, but unlike a porcupine the quills can’t be released as a defensive measure.  You don’t see Tasmanian dogs with echidna quills stuck in their noses!  If you’re careful, you can pick up an echidna – though you probably really shouldn’t.    

Echidnas are a type of monotreme.  Monotremes are egg-laying mammals.  The only other example is another Australian oddball, the platypus.  Female echidnas lay a single egg into a pouch – they don’t lay them on the ground in a nest, so you’re unlikely to find any echidna eggs.  The egg is incubated in the pouch and in 7-10 days the baby echidna (known as a ‘puggle’) hatches.  It stays in the pouch feeding on its mother’s milk until its ready for the outside world, about 6-8 weeks.  The development of the puggle’s sharp spines is what marks the moment – momma echidnas don’t like being poked.

They’re renowned for their slow metabolism and their typically low body temperature.  In the winter months, echidnas enter into a type of hibernation known as torpor.  By Canadian standards, winters in my home city of Launceston are quite mild.  Occasionally it does fall below freezing, but most of the time daytime highs are 10-14 degrees Celsius.  Despite that, you’ll seldom see an echidna in the winter.  Even those relatively mild winter temperatures will put them into a state of torpor.

Other fun facts about echidnas:

  • They don’t have teeth. Instead they have rough pads on their tongues and roofs of their mouths between which they grind their food.
  • Male echidnas have a spurs on their hind legs which secrete a smelly substance thought to play a role in communication. 
  • Male echidnas also have four penises, but only two are functional at any given moment. 
  • Apparently because of their slow metabolism, echidnas can live up to 50 years.
  • Historically they were used for food by First Nations. After all, they are easy to catch.

I’ve always had a fascination with wildlife, so my regular encounters with echidnas never get old.  I love watching them waddle along and intently search for insects.   But more than that, for me seeing echidnas is a moment to stop and praise God, the Creator of these amazing creatures.  It’s doxological.  Echidnas are unique animals, purposefully designed for their environment and also to bring adoration to their Maker.  When I see one, I always try to remind myself that my Father, who holds all things in his hand, has put this one echidna on my path so that I would see it and praise his handiwork.  Echidnas truly are eccentric members of the animal world, but like us, they were put on this planet for the glory of God.

A sixth sense? Yup, it’s true.

Jon Dykstra

We all know about the standard five senses – taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing – but did you know some of God’s creatures have a little something extra?

In some animals that extra amounts to “super senses”: hummingbirds can see in the ultraviolet range (their eyes’ 4 types of color receptors is one more than we have), and elephants can communicate over long distances by using tones that are so low our ears can’t detect them.

In other animals that extra something goes beyond the standard five senses. Bumblebees seem to be able to use the positive electrical charge their bodies generate while buzzing around to help them detect flowers’ pollen which has a negative charge.

Meanwhile, sea turtles are able to somehow navigate across the ocean using variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to guide them on their way. Exactly how they do it is unclear, but scientists are closing in on how birds do something similar, and remarkably, it may involve quantum mechanics. It’s theory at this point and a really complicated one at that, but just the gist of it is amazing enough. Scientists are speculating that some birds can “see” the earth’s magnetic fields and do so by using particles in their eyes that are in a “quantum entangled” state. We don’t need to worry about what that exactly means; here’s one key point: that state lasts for just 1/10,000th of a second. That these birds might be processing information derived from a state lasting such a short time is pretty cool, but there’s another incredible wrinkle, as detailed by PBS Nova‘s Katherine J. Wu.

“Even in ideal laboratory conditions, which usually involve powerful vacuums or astoundingly icy temperatures, artificial quantum entanglement can unravel in just nanoseconds. And yet, in the wet, messy environment of a bird’s eye, entanglement holds. ‘It seems nature has found a way to make these quantum states live much longer than we’d expect, and much longer than we can do in the lab,’ Gauger says. ‘No one thought that was possible.’”

A nanosecond is a billionth of a second (yes, I had to look it up). This might have us tempted to say that the birdbrains are beating the brainiacs, but as amazing as the bird’s performance is, to give the credit where it is due we should be singing the praises of its Designer!

Humans beings also have a sixth sense, and we’re not talking about ESP. Proprioception is your sense of bodily awareness – the ability to know where all the bits of your body are without looking or feeling them. That might not seem as cool as “seeing” magnetic fields, but just consider what it allows you to do. When you close your eyes and can still touch your nose, that’s proprioception enabling you to do it. This is also why a quarterback can throw the ball accurately, even though his overhand motion doesn’t really allow him to see his throwing arm until the ball is released. And proprioception is why you can be balanced (even on one leg!) and how you can walk, without having to look down at your feet. This is one important sense!

So if you’ve ever thanked God for the wonderful flowers you can smell, the amazing sunrise you can see, the funky music you can hear, the delicious pizza you can taste, or the amazing softness of a newborn’s cheek that you can just barely feel, now you know there’s also a sixth sense to marvel at and thank Him for!

Why we’ll never run out of things to discover!

Jon Dykstra

A few years ago National Geographic published a provocatively titled article:

“Opinion: Science is running out of things to discover.”

Author John Horgan’s view is a rarity, but not entirely unique – it was already popping up in the late 19th century. In Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory, he shares this recollection from famed physicist Robert Millikan:

“In 1894, I lived…with four other Columbia graduate students, one a medic and the other three working in sociology and political science, and I was ragged continuously by all of them for sticking to a ‘finished’, yes, a ‘dead subject’, like physics when the new ‘live’ field of the social sciences was just opening up.”

There was an idea at the time that it would be possible to finish off a whole field of science because we’d discovered all there was to learn there. This was a minority view then and is today, but there’s a reason some scientists held it and a reason some still do. The new discoveries still being made are evidence against it, but when Horgan’s view is evaluated from an evolutionary perspective, it’s actually the logical conclusion to draw.

After all, if the physical universe is all there is then no matter how vast, it is finite. And if it was brought about by chance, and without purpose, then just how sophisticated and complex can the universe really be? Shouldn’t we expect to figure it all out eventually?

Deeper and deeper

In contrast, Christians have every reason to expect the discoveries will never end. We know the universe was crafted with purpose, and designed to reflect the attributes of our infinite God (Ps. 19:1-4, Roman 1:19-20). We should assume that no matter how deep we dig into God’s creation there’ll always be more to uncover.

And that is, in fact, what we find.

In the last decade, there has been a flood of discoveries related to our own DNA. Back when Darwin first published his book On the Origin of the Species, the individual cell was a “black box” – its inner workings were undiscovered and thought to be simple structures. That assumption served Darwin’s theory because the more complex that Man proves to be, the more obvious it is that we couldn’t have come about by evolutionary happenstance.

But since then we’ve discovered that even a single one of our cells has a level of complexity comparable to that of a city, with its own microscopic vehicles traveling on its own highways, carrying material from manufacturing plants, supplied by energy from its power plants.

Even after DNA was discovered and we started to get a glimmering of how much more was going on in the cell than Darwin had thought, evolutionists repeated their mistake – they underestimated the cell’s complexity. Again, that was only natural: how complex should something produced by unguided processes really be? So it was, that prior to about 2012, evolutionary scientists were writing off the 98.5% of human DNA that didn’t produce proteins as being “junk DNA” because they had no apparent function. As evolution apologist Richard Dawkins put it in his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth: The evidence for Evolution: 

“it is a remarkable fact that the greater part 95% percent (in the case of humans) of the genome might as well be not there for the difference it makes.”

But just a few years later the ENCODE project discovered this “junk DNA” was active, getting transcribed into RNA, and may have a role in regulating protein production. There’s lots of maybes and perhaps still being tossed about, so there’s much more to discover, and in an area of the genome that was once thought to be unimportant.

Still sticking with DNA, one of the more fascinating recent discoveries has been how the same section of our DNA can produce differentproteins if read different ways. Or as Andrew Moore explained in Nov 12, 2019 Advanced Science News article “That ‘junk’ DNA…is full of information!”

“One of the intriguing things about DNA sequences is that a single sequence can ‘encode’ more than one piece of information depending on what is ‘reading’ it and in which direction – viral genomes are classic examples in which genes read in one direction to produce a given protein overlap with one or more genes read in the opposite direction…to produce different proteins. It’s a bit like making simple messages with reverse-pair words (a so-called emordnilap). For example: REEDSTOPSFLOW, which, by an imaginary reading device, could be divided into REED STOPS FLOW. Read backwards, it would give WOLF SPOTS DEER.”

Once again, the deeper we dig the more we find there is to learn!

No end in sight

What’s true for our DNA is true everywhere else too – Millikan’s roommates couldn’t have been wronger about physics being a dead science. But endless and ever more intricate discoveries present a problem to an evolutionary theory that says the universe is finite and unplanned. If they were right, there should be an end to it. But no such end is in sight.

In contrast, these constant discoveries are an inspiration to Christians. Knowing our Creator to be inexhaustibly great, God’s people can look forward to not only a lifetime of discoveries, but to an eternity of them!

Jon Dykstra is the editor of Reformed Perspective.

Dr. Gordon Wilson: The ordinary is extraordinary

Jon Dykstra

During the Creation Science Association of Alberta’s Creation Weekend 2018, Dr. Gordon Wilson was the featured speaker, giving three lectures. Dr. Margaret Helder offers an account of his second presentation below.

*****

While Dr. Gordon Wilson had entitled his presentation “The Magnificence of the Mundane” he wanted us to note that the words in the title are actually contradictory. While the word “magnificence” communicates excitement, the term “mundane” suggests that something is boring or dull.

But what he wanted to share with us is that God’s “ordinary” work in creation is amazing, displaying God’s wisdom and finesse (Ps. 104:24). And in this context, we are told that King Solomon – full of wisdom – spoke about trees, herbaceous plants, beasts, birds, reptiles and fish (1 Kings 4:33).

It is evident, declared Dr. Wilson, that one place to observe God’s wisdom is in nature. Similarly if one wants to be an expert on the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, one will endeavor to study his creative works in addition to any of his writings. Thus, said our speaker, biology is part of theology. It is the study of who God is, as an artist, engineer, and sculptor. In this context, Dr. Wilson discussed several organisms that might seem mundane or ordinary, but which are actually quite amazing.

THE “NORMAL” EASTERN BOX TURTLE

The eastern box turtle lives in the eastern half of the United States. This animal may look quite ordinary (as turtle appearances go), but it has an amazing capacity to survive cold winters. As fall gives way to winter, this reptile builds up high levels of glucose in its blood. This acts as a sort-of antifreeze which prevents ice crystals from forming in its cells (ice is allowed to build up in the turtle’s body cavity, but not in its cells where ice crystals would poke and rupture the membranes). With all this chill, the heart can even stop. But then, in the spring, when things start melting, the heart starts up again and the turtle goes about his normal life activities.

ORDINARY HOUSEFLY

In keeping with Dr. Wilson’s theme of looking at everyday creatures, what could be more ordinary than houseflies? It turns out, however, that these organisms have quite an interesting way to escape from the confining walls of their pupal stage.

It so happens that there is a trapdoor of sorts fashioned in the skin on the face of the developing fly. Muscles in the abdomen push blood vigorously into the head. This blood fills an inflatable bag, which in turn pushes open the trapdoor and then bulges out from the face. This bag, called the ptilinum, exerts pressure on the puparium– the cocoon-like structure formed from the maggot skin which houses the pupa as it develops into the now-emerging adult. The puparium also has a weakened seam that cracks under pressure from the ptilinum. The now-adult-fly pushes out through the opened seam, and afterwards the blood-filled ptilinum empties, and retreats back into the body, and the trapdoor in the fly’s head closes back up.

Then, behold, we see a normal fly descending on our hamburgers!

LASSO-SWINGING SPIDERS

More showy are the hunting habits of the Bolas spiders. These creatures, which look like bird droppings (for purposes of camouflage), share many characteristics with ordinary orb weaver spiders, and can be found throughout the eastern United States down to Chile. At night these spiders – looking every bit like cowboys swinging a lasso – hang from a leaf and swing their “bolas,” a thread with a glob of sticky glue attached to the end.

https://youtu.be/bQABY9H1h1Y?t=182

This amazing spider secretes a very special organic molecule: the scent of a particular female moth. This compound, called a pheromone, acts like a perfume to attract male moths of the same species. The spider deftly swings its bolas and hits the incoming male moth, penetrating his scales. The spider then hauls in her pretty and wraps it up in silk. This spider is even able to vary the chemical composition of the pheromones in order to catch another moth species. The ability of the spider to imitate such elaborate pheromone designs demonstrates that these spiders possess remarkable synthetic abilities that could never have developed by trial and error. Magnificent indeed! And certainly not mundane.

FUN FUNGUS

Dr. Wilson also discussed spore dispersal in ferns, mosses, and in a fascinating little fungus called Pilobolus. This little fungus grows on the dung of animals like horses and cows. The entire fungus is only about 1 centimeter tall, but it consists of a short stalk with a bulging balloon-like area above, topped by a black cap which shelters many fungus spores. The bulgy area focuses light onto carotenoid pigments in its base.

The bulge, with cap on top, grows straight sideways towards the incoming morning light. Pressure builds up in the bulge so that the cap is shot off at high pressure. Full of spores the cap lands and clings to grass about 2 meters away from the manure. Then along comes a grazing animal. The fresh grass looks good enough to eat and, once inside the animal, the spores proceed through the digestion system without germinating. Once deposited outside in another dump of manure, more miniature Pilobolus specimens grow to start the process all over again.

CONCLUSION

These examples demonstrate wonderful design and fascinating ingenuity. Yet there are taken from everyday life. The “ordinary” around us is extraordinary!

Dr. Wilson concluded with the admonition that we should observe Creation and ponder that God made it. God did not give us all the answers. He wants us to explore. As we read in Proverbs 25:2 “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

This article first appeared in the March 2019 issue of “Creation Science Dialogue” and is reprinted here with permission. Dr. Margaret Helder is the author of “No Christian Silence on Science.” Dr. Gordon Wilson has recently completed his second nature documentary called “The Riot and the Dance: Water”