Green islands
by Joachim Scheven
Anyone strolling through an oak or beach forest in the northern hemisphere autumn
(fall) is sure to find them—among the countless brown leaves scattered on
the ground, some are still green (very green, in fact) in one portion (see photo
below).
Photo by Joachim Scheven, LEBENDIGE VORWELT Museum
If you look closely, you discover on this leaf a whitish spot, or else a winding
trail. This is evidence that the larva of a tiny leaf-mining moth is living inside
the leaf. Leaf-mining species also occur among beetles and flies.
Why don’t the infested leaves turn completely brown like the rest? The amazing
thing is that the larva secretes a hormone that keeps the surrounding area of the
leaf fresh. The cells of these ‘green islands’ still keep on photosynthesizing—making
food from sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air. And the tiny larvae continue to
live on the carbohydrates formed by this process, even after the leaf itself has
dropped to the ground and died. Only some time later do these larvae leave the leaf
and enter the ground to pupate.
This presents some riddles for those who adhere to evolution:
- Which were the first caterpillars to stumble on the idea of no longer gnawing the
leaves from the outside, but crawling into their insides?
-
Photo by Joachim Scheven, LEBENDIGE VORWELT Museum
How could the larvae that were thus transformed know that their tree would shortly
shed its leaves, so they could prepare for that event?
- What would have happened if these mining caterpillars had failed, at their very
first attempt, to synthesize the right hormone? It is only being able to secrete
this hormone which guarantees that they can keep on living on the forest floor.
And what should we make of the fact that fossils of such leaf miners are already
found in the ‘geologically oldest’ fossil leaves of the upper Cretaceous?
This one [see photo right, arrow shows trail of leaf-mining moth] is from the Dakota sandstone in Kansas, USA, which is
regarded as being from the alleged ‘age of the dinosaurs.’
At most, evolutionists will not be able to produce more than some flimsy ‘just-so’
story. It makes much more sense to believe that these obvious provisions by the
Creator for His creatures were programmed into the insects from the beginning.
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