Creation Station
Amazing Animals
What Big Teeth You Have - Survival of the Cooperative
A
phrase that is used so often that it has become part of our vocabulary
is survival of the fittest, but it represents an idea that is widely
misunderstood. Presented by the evolutionist media as showing a
competitive world of violence, red in tooth and claw, what the phrase
really means is that animals and people have been designed with a
variety of survival traits. Many of these survival traits aren't
competitive, but are instead cooperative. One of the most intriguing
examples of cooperation in nature are the cleaner fish and barracuda.
Barracuda are long, thin fish that spend their day swimming around the Caribbean looking for smaller fish to eat, except when it comes time to have their teeth cleaned. Ever wonder how barracuda get their teeth cleaned? Probably not something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, but it does make for an interesting story.
After the barracuda spends many days hunting and eating little fish, its teeth get filled with food particles and parasites, apparently causing irritation to the barracuda's mouth. When this irritation gets bad enough, the barracuda goes to the cleaning station.
Barracuda
Divers
in the Caribbean have reported seeing barracuda lined up several deep
at these cleaning stations waiting their turn to get their teeth
cleaned. When each barracuda's turn comes up they swim to the cleaning
station and have the accumulated rubbish removed from their teeth and
gills. For several minutes the little fish and shrimp crawl all over
the barracuda's mouth and gills cleaning them up, all without
interference from the barracuda. After the cleaner fish are done, they
swim out unmolested and move on to their next customer.
While the behavior of the barracuda and cleaner fish is mutually beneficial and understandable. Now, the question is, how did this behavior get started in the first place?
This behavior is called cleaning symbiosis. A similar type of behavior is observed with the Yucca moth and Yucca plant which are dependent on each other for survival. Yucca moths only lay their eggs in Yucca plants and Yucca plants are only pollinated by Yucca moths. Symbiotic relationships like these pose an unanswerable problem for evolutionists because for a symbiotic relationship to develop a number of individual behaviors have to develop simultaneously.
For those who refuse to believe in a Creator, how to explain behavior that is clearly designed to be cooperative? It is only within a Creationist framework that the individual behaviors of very different creatures can be understood to be the result of the Creator coordinating these behaviors to be mutually beneficial.
Survival of the cooperative is another example of how we can see God's handiwork in His Creation.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
