God’s Amazing Creatures

Dr. Ray Bohlin marvels at God’s creativity in making three magnificent creatures: the mantis shrimp, the woodpecker, and the monarch butterfly with its amazing migration story.

The Woodpecker Tongue

In this article I highlight several of God’s amazing creatures: the woodpecker, the mantis shrimp, and the migration of the monarch butterfly from North America to the Central Highlands of Mexico.

So, what about woodpeckers?

They’re rather strange birds; they bang their heads into trees! No doubt you’ve heard the rhythmic drumming of a woodpecker in your yard or in the forest. They come in many shapes and sizes. But what they all have in common is some form of pecking. You may not know that this behavior is not just about searching for insects, but most woodpeckers do not sing like other birds; instead, drumming is their form of communication.

Usually the pecking behavior is used to uncover small tunnels containing insects or larvae. When the tunnel is exposed, the woodpecker inserts its tongue and searches up and down the tunnel.

 

The woodpecker tongue can extend up to three times the length of its beak! The tongue, from the tip at the end of the beak, does not attach to the lower jaw as most bird tongues do, but it makes a loop into the throat, comes up around the back of the skull, and sometimes extends into the right nostril and into the upper beak.

The tongue lengthens by reattaching between the eyes, the loop in the throat flattens out, and out comes the tongue–far beyond the tip of the beak. Now, evolving a long woodpecker tongue poses a unique problem. Two things must be accomplished at once. The tongue must get longer and at the same time a retraction mechanism must be accomplished at the same time. These two processes need to be coordinated for everything to be optimized. Evolution can’t accomplish that.

The tongue usually has bristles at the tip and a sticky saliva so insects can’t wiggle off. However, for the woodpecker to chisel into tree bark and the wood of the tree, it needs to generate some real force. Next I’ll discuss the rapidity of pecking and how the woodpecker survives the shock of its pecking.

The Woodpecker’s Ability to Absorb Shock

The woodpecker has a long tongue, but its pecking also generates some real force and it needs to be able to deal with that without getting a severe headache or even a concussion. Suffering like that would not allow woodpeckers to survive very well. But God has designed ways for the woodpecker to redistribute the shock, and the structure of its skull and brain aid in that function.

Surrounding the human brain is a layer of cerebrospinal fluid. When the brain receives a hard blow, it pushes that fluid aside, and the brain is bruised when it meets the skull. This is a concussion. God designed the woodpecker to avoid this kind of shock, first because the brain is smaller, and there is not much fluid between the brain and the skull.

The woodpecker has a sort of shock absorber of muscle and cartilage at the back of the bill and in front of the skull. Also, the lower part of the bill is slightly longer than the upper part of the bill, and this hits the tree first. This allows some of the shock to bypass the skull and connect with the spinal cord, and then the shock travels down the spinal cord into the stiff tail feathers placed against the tree–and the shock flows back into the tree with little effect on the woodpecker.

The woodpecker can drum up to twenty times per second. God created the neck muscles to be strong and able to recover quickly to maintain that kind of speed.

Lastly, pecking wood results in wood chips spraying out from the tree, which could damage the woodpecker’s eye. But the woodpecker has a third eyelid called a nictitating membrane that shields the eye, and just before impact, the regular eyelids close. Thus, no chips in the eye. God did that.

The Mantis Shrimp Packs a Punch

You likely have never heard of the mantis shrimp. This fascinating crustacean is neither a mantis nor a shrimp. Technically, they are from the family of stomatopods.

They look somewhat like shrimp, and the club variety has an appearance like a praying mantis. I’m interested in the club variety of the mantis shrimp. They use this club to strike a snail or a crab to break the snail open or to separate a limb from a crab. They can generate a tremendous amount of force with this club. The acceleration is about the same as a 22-caliber bullet.

I found a video from Maya De Vries from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute on a cruise ship. She shows a video of the mantis shrimp strike on a snail. When the club hits a snail, you see a flash of light and heat that is followed by a similar flash but slower. The linear velocity of the strike is 14 to 23 meters per second. The heat generated is the temperature of the surface of the sun. These flashes of light are caused by cavitation bubbles. The club moves so fast that it creates negative pressure, causing the cavitation bubble. When the bubble implodes, that releases light and heat.

You can’t keep a mantis shrimp in an ordinary aquarium. You need reinforced glass for the walls of the aquarium, otherwise the mantis shrimp can break the glass. I found another video of a fisherman who pulls in a mantis shrimp, and the club smashes into his new booties as he calls them, pierces through and gives him a bleeding cut.

The Mantis Shrimp’s Eyesight

Another remarkable feature of the mantis shrimp is its eyes. Like most animals, they have two eye sockets. However, there are three pupils in each eye. With our two eyes with one pupil in each, we have binocular vision that gives us depth perception. Mantis shrimp have six pupils, so they have hexnocular vision. We have little idea of what this looks like, but we do know that each pupil can be used independently of the others.  On top of this, its compound eyes, like that of a fly or a bee, are composed roughly 10,000 photoreceptive units. These are capable of instantly processing information, instead of needing to send the information to the brain first.{1}

A second aspect of mantis shrimp vision is their color perception. As humans we have three color receptors in our eyes: red, green and blue. These three colors mixed in a multitude of ways allow us to see the colors of the rainbow and more. The mantis shrimp, however, has twelve color receptors, from ultraviolet to infrared. This means it can see colors we can’t even imagine! Again, what this looks like to the mantis shrimp we really don’t know, but that’s just amazing.

One last feature of their vision is their ability to see polarized light. They use this ability as a secret code. They have a pair of appendages that produce circular polarized light. Their eyes are the only eyes we know of that can detect this kind of light. The mantis shrimp is very territorial, and they use this ability to signal that “this hole is occupied.” Engineers are currently studying the mantis shrimp’s vision to develop the next generation of imaging technology.{2}

God gave this small stomatopod the fastest attack in the animal kingdom and also the most unique eyesight.

The Monarch Butterfly’s Migration

You’ve probably seen a monarch butterfly with vibrant orange and black coloration. When in North America, the monarchs feed and lay their eggs on milkweed plants. If you are able to buy a few milkweed plants in the spring, you can enjoy the butterflies, their caterpillars, and the chrysalis.

Before we get to the monarch’s migration, let’s talk about what happens in the chrysalis. Basically, the caterpillar melts down into a soup. There are a few remaining cells that take the organic soup and construct a completely new body plan, the butterfly. The caterpillar cannot reproduce, but the butterfly can. The caterpillar essentially dies in the chrysalis. For caterpillar death to make any sense, there must already be in place a plan to construct a reproducing butterfly. But evolution has no foresight. It depends on randomly produced mutations for nature to select from, going forward. The transformation inside a chrysalis is a genuine evolutionary mystery.

The eastern monarch butterflies have been known for centuries to migrate south in the fall. But where did they go? It wasn’t until 1975 that in a fir forest, 10,000 feet above sea level about 70 miles west of Mexico City, the monarchs were found. Literally millions of monarchs flutter among the trees in a beautiful cascade of orange and black. The monarchs make the journey with instinct. In North America, once the monarchs arrive in the spring, the multiple generations that are hatched only live for a few weeks. None of the monarchs who travel south have made the trip before. The generation that does make the trip south can live for up to nine months. They are called the Methusaleh Generation. These are the same monarchs that migrate north in the spring. And they have the same DNA as the monarchs that only live a few weeks!

I hope you enjoyed my discussions of woodpeckers, mantis shrimp and butterflies. It’s a joy to bring it to you.

Notes
1. https://live.stemfellowship.org/mantis-shrimp-20-20-20-20-20-20-vision/
2. https://nature.sciencearray.com/mantis-shrimp-vision-hyperspectral-color-technology

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