Good morning world! The leaves are
all coming out on the trees, turning spring into early summer. It makes me want
to take a trip to the beach!
Speaking of beaches…Did Noah have marine animals on the ark
too?
The answer is no! Genesis 7:14-15
and 21-23 states only birds and land-dwelling, air-breathing (through nostrils)
animals were on the ark. Well then Willow, you may be asking, how did the ocean animals survive a
deluge of fresh water, and contrarily how did the fresh water critters survive
when the seas overflowed their boundaries.
It is true, as the water covered
the earth, fresh and salt waters would have mixed into a diluted solution of
both. However, there are several things to take into consideration:
First, it is not known exactly how
salty pre-flood oceans were. We do know, though, from scripture that there was
a “breaking up of the fountains of the
great deep”. We can also be confident the flood was associated with immense
plate tectonic movements that would result in massive volcanic activity.
Underwater volcanoes or fissures would create enormous amounts of hot/boiling
water/steam, which in turn would dissolve minerals adding salts to the waters.
Second, erosion as the water
receded over the newly formed landmasses would also have carried minerals,
including salt, into the water.
So, with this information in mind,
we can draw the logical conclusion that pre-flood oceans were not as salty as
our current oceans are. So why can’t fish go from fresh to salt water and visa
versa today? Well, who says they can’t? All fish have a certain amount of salt
in their bodies (just like us). Fresh water fish tend to absorb water through
their cell walls (osmosis) because they have more salt in their bodies than the
surrounding water. Saltwater fish, on the other hand, tend to lose water from
their bodies for exactly the opposite reason.
It would be just like God to have
placed in the genes of marine and fresh water creatures alike the ability to adapt
to different conditions. We actually see examples of this in many of today’s
organisms.
For example, there are creatures
such as starfish and barnacles as well as other esuarine tidepool species that
survive changes in salinity on a daily basis.
There are many species of fish
that migrate between salt and fresh waters, such as salmon, striped bass,
Atlantic sturgeon and eels. This demonstrates the capacity of many extant
species of today to adjust to both salt and fresh water. “There is also
evidence of post-flood specialization within a kind (a biblical biological
classification) of fish. For example, the Atlantic sturgeon is a migratory
salt/freshwater species but the Siberian sturgeon (a different species of the
same kind) lives only in fresh water.”
In addition, a discovery in Scotland occurred when wild fresh water trout were breed with
farmed saltwater salmon producing viable young. This implies the differences
between freshwater and saltwater species may be slight indeed.
As a matter of fact, there are
many families - a biological classification - of fish that include marine and
freshwater species. The following is a partial list:
Toad
fish garpike bowfin sturgeon
catfish flatfish salmon/trout/pike
Clingfish stickleback scorpionfish
Herring/anchovy
And, get this, more families of extant
fish contain representatives of both fresh and saltwater fish than not! So what
does all of this mean? “This suggests that the ability to tolerate large
changes in salinity was present in most fish at the time of the flood.
Specialization, through natural selection, may have resulted in the loss of
this ability in many species since then…”
And what of those species that
haven’t lost the ability to switch between waters of different salinity? Two
different things are known. One, freshwater species expel excess water with a
low salt concentration in their urine. Marine species expel excess salt with a
high salt concentration in their urine. And two, the amount of urea (a chemical
compound), an animal retains plays a role in salinity tolerance. For example,
freshwater sharks have low concentrations of urea in their blood (to avoid
accumulating water), while saltwater sharks have high concentrations of urea in
their blood (to retain water).
Even more interesting, is many
public aquariums use the ability of fish to adapt to their environment by
changing the salinity in an aquarium slowly. Thus they can exhibit fresh water
and marine species together. The fascinating point is that many species “have
the capacity to adapt to both fresh and salt water within their own lifetimes.”
Ok, that explains fish, but what
about dolphins, whales, plesiosaurs and the like? Actually, they and those like
them would have had an easier time adapting in one regard - they are not
dependent on getting their oxygen from clean water. During the deluge and
breaking forth of the fountain of the deep, the waters would have been
turbulent, and the geological record tells us, was full of sediment. This would
not have affected the aquatic air-breathing animals. As far as the salinity,
their presence today suggests similar adaptability as the fish kinds.
Many marine animals would have
perished in the Noachian flood. “The fossil record testifies to the massive
destruction of marine life, with marine creatures accounting for ninety five
percent of the fossil record.”
But those that did survive did so
because God gave them the means from the very beginning; during creation. What a wise Creator we have!
Until next week, God bless and
take care-
Willow
Reference:
Ham, ken, et. al., The Revised
& Expanded Answers Book, 3/2000, Masterbooks, Inc., pp. 187-189
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