TRUTH MATTERS

Dr. Jobe Martin has a neat DVD series entitled “Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution” in which he shows some very high quality video clips of some pretty amazing creatures. In Part 3 of the series, he describes mussels — little clam-like creatures that live on the sea floor and have the amazing ability to mimic minnows. The picture above is a screenshot of such a mussel going “fishing” for a larger fish like a bass. The bass is tricked into thinking he is seeing a minnow, and, following his bass instincts, opens his mouth and tries to eat the “minnow.” Now everyone knows how fast bass are in grabbing bait. They apparently didn’t attend the Emily Post School of Table Manners because they gulp their food quickly. But … the mussel is faster. Before the bass has chance to get his mouth around the “minnow,” the mussel shoots a high velocity stream of eggs (!!) into the bass’ mouth! The eggs hatch and the larva attach to the gills of the bass and extract nourishment from them. Read more HERE. Amazing! Why didn’t I learn this in school? Why are mussels not even mentioned in the 2006 Prentice Hall Biology textbook used in public high school classrooms around the USA? Why did a supposedly “anti-science” creationist have to be the one that informed me of this amazing little creature with such a weird reproductive system? Maybe because Miller and Levine (the Prentice Hall authors) don’t have an evolutionary explanation for it? Think of it! Shooting your eggs into a fish’s mouth to nourish your babies? Wow. That’s weird. How in the world did these creatures evolve this ability?

Well, like a good evolution skeptic, I did a literature search (including Talk Origins) for evolutionary explanations of mussel mimicry and did not find anything. I did find a poster in a forum who made an attempt HERE. He writes … Read more »