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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Matthew Priebe

Without This Animal You Will Die!

What we'll be talking about is some fairly high concept creation science issues in today's program.

And that is only going to continue with this 1, because the last program of the evening that I'm doing now is extremely advanced in terms of the material that I have assembled.

I have gone to a huge variety of sources to get the information of what we will be talking about this evening from just a range of different places.

If I was doing this as a regular paper presentation to a symposium of some sort, I would have the paper with hundreds of footnotes from all the places that I have gathered information from.

That is not available to a public speaking presentation like this.

The information I'm coming to you with is accurate because I can't footnote it in the presentation and say, here, look it up.

But this is all cutting-edge information that has been put together over the last few years in various scientific circles and various disciplines.

And so I'm going to be coming up with information and statistics that are gonna shock you.

And you're gonna go, that's not real, that can't be right, but it is real.

And so this is something that we're really talking about majorly important issues in this last program.

Father in heaven, we ask as this last Vesper program starts, as we finish out this Sabbath day, to again look to you for our inspiration and guidance as we try to understand your world and what you have put in it for us to discover and learn from.

Is nature a simple display of a few basic components that are all alike?

Or is nature found to be far more complex than we ever dreamed possible?

When God created the universe, he made a construction that we can only begin to comprehend with our limited knowledge.

So perhaps we can focus on the earth and try to understand 1 small speck of creation.

When previous generations tried to comprehend our world, they found such intricacies that they often resorted to superstition to explain the mysteries.

Modern science has delved deeply into the lives of plants and animals and the ways they interact.

But instead of reaching the end of the mysteries, science has only uncovered new questions that lead to even more mysteries.

In fact, science is as far from solving the intricacies of nature now as it was a century ago.

God made life more interlocked than seems possible.

Plants and animals and the world that supports them are meshed together in a web of interactions.

We have found that every form of life is dependent on another form.

If we pluck 1 thread of life, we find it attached to the rest of creation.

Plants require both animals and other plants.

Animals require both plants and other animals.

Both plants and animals require the minerals, gases, and weather that the planet provides.

And we have found that the same is true of us.

Humans are more dependent than we realize on the complex interactions of all life around us.

Often we assume that we are so advanced in technology and civilization that we are now immune to what happens in nature.

But with each new discovery and each new interaction found, we find that we are actually depend on a great many other forms of life for our own existence.

Rather than being impregnably secure, humans are actually on a knife edge of survival, relying on a host of other organisms for our very existence.

This is no surprise, as God has created all life to be dependent on other life.

So what are the interactions that we need to survive?

Is it really true that without a particular animal, we would die?

We would be well advised to discover and protect the animals we need to keep us alive.

In this program, we will examine those processes God has established on Earth that maintain human life and the individual animals that make those processes work.

We might be surprised which are the most important animals to our survival.

Of course, everything we see today on earth is God's backup plan.

The perfect world of Eden was a very different place than what we see now.

No death, disease, danger, or competition existed.

When sin began, almost every aspect of life had to change.

God had to totally remake his original creation.

Without drastic intervention, life on earth would likely have ceased to exist.

So we should remember that the nature we study today is not God's original plan, but rather his temporary way of dealing with the crisis of sin.

Also, it should be noted that everything I say here is a simplified version of the complexities existing in nature.

To go into excessive detail would take more time than we have and needlessly confuse the issue.

There are exceptions and subtleties to every area we will examine.

The first area we're gonna look at is pollination.

Without plants, the survival of most animal life is impossible.

Plants produce the oxygen animals must breathe.

But there is a second major service plants provide, food.

Even predators depend on plants to feed their vegetarian prey.

So whatever keeps plants alive is obviously crucial.

Plants grow from a seed, reach maturity, and then reproduce the next generation.

Plants usually reproduce by cross-pollination.

This gives plants diverse genes that keep them healthy.

Some plants, especially conifer trees, let the wind blow their pollen randomly.

But most plants use animals to spread their pollen to others of their species, including most food plants we eat.

70% of flowering plants need insects to pollinate them, including 2 3rds of our crops.

Plants attract specific animals to their flowers, place pollen on animals, and gather pollen brought to them by animals.

So now we will examine animal pollinators, for they must do the job of pollination or we will die.

Bats pollinate many desert and tropical plants.

They drink nectar from night flowers and carry pollen on their fur.

Birds that drink nectar do the same thing with day-blooming flowers, but relatively few birds or mammals pollinate.

Of the other vertebrates, only some gecko species regularly visit flowers and carry pollen, especially in jungles.

We were just down in Queensland in Australia and found a tiny little gecko crawling around through a large group of flowers and just moving around through the entire flower, that was his entire home.

And that was a very elegant example of the gecko pollinators.

The vast majority of pollination is done by the insects.

Bees and other wasps either visit many varieties or are specialized for a single species.

We all know that honeybees industriously drink from flowers, but native bees, usually small, are actually much more important in keeping plants thriving.

Localized bee species are the backbone of healthy habitats.

Some bees, such as bumblebees, vibrate their bodies at a specific frequency to loosen pollen grains for collection.

Certain plants, such as tomatoes, require this buzz pollination for existence.

Beetles come in so many forms that it's no surprise that a large group are pollinators.

Tiny beetles are often abundant, all working hard feeding themselves and keeping their food source successful.

We think of flies as biters and spreaders of disease, but only a few species do so.

Most drink nectar from all types of flowers.

Flies have scent detectors on their head and large eyes with color vision to help them find flowers.

Taste receptors on their legs and feet let flies taste the flowers.

We know now of over 1, 100 plant species pollinated specifically by flies.

So when it comes to our food, clothing made from plants, and the very air we breathe, We depend on the great insect world in all its many forms.

This is why pesticides have been so dangerous.

For every harmful insect species killed, many more harmless and beneficial species are also destroyed.

Every insect form lost will mean the plants that rely on them will be lost too.

Areas in China that have lost insect pollinators now require humans to hand pollinate each individual flower.

Do we really want to take on the arduous job of pollinating our food ourselves?

Insects pollinate plants for free, and they are happy to do it.

Temporarily reducing mosquitoes is not worth losing our food supply.

In 1 case alone, 50, 000 bumblebees were killed after insecticides were sprayed in trees to kill the aphids.

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Without This Animal You Will Die!

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