What can we learn from whales?
Application: God's miraculous creation includes amazing ocean mammals.
In this L.I.F.E. Lesson, Dr. Bob visits San Diego, California and takes a boat out into the Pacific Ocean to get close to Grey Whales, and Dolphins. These amazing creatures defy evolution, and are evidence of the great sea animals God created on the 5th day of creation.
Supplemental Information
Whales are amazing creatures. Every year, gray whales like the ones we saw undertake one of the longest migrations of any mammal, traveling 12,000 miles round-trip from their feeding grounds in the Arctic to calve and breed in the Baja lagoons, and then back again.
Whales, dolphins, and porpoises belong to a group of animals called cetaceans. Despite living in the water, they are not fish; they are mammals, just like dogs, elephants, mice and kangaroos. There are certain features that scientists use to distinguish mammals from other animals. They must be:
warm-blooded,
breathe air
give birth to live young
nurse their young with milk and
have hair.
Whales swim with the aid of their muscular tail and forked tail fluke that moves up and down to propel them forward.
When a wolf wags its tail, it swishes its tail from side to side. And fish move their tails from side to side. A whale moves its tail vertically. If a whale evolved from a wolf (or other mammal) this small change in direction would involve dramatic changes in physiology. Simply changing the direction of tail movement would crush the pelvis of an animal that was evolving a modified tail movement, and would have significant impact on its reproductive organs. The whale moves its tail vertically because God designed it to.
There are several different kinds of whales:
First are the mysticetes, or baleen whales. This group contains the largest animals that have ever existed, like the gray whale, blue whale and the humpback whale. Weighing 173 tons and measuring almost 100 feet, the blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever existed. Instead of teeth, these whales have rows of long plates in their mouths covered in bristle-like structures. These are called baleen plates, and the whales use them to filter small animals, mostly krill, from the surrounding water.
Second, are the odontocetes, or toothed whales. This group contains dolphins, porpoises, orcas, sperm whales, narwhals, and belugas. The sperm whale is the largest, measuring up to 66 feet from snout to tail fluke and weighing more than 45 tons. Toothed whales are well-known for their ability to navigate with sound (echolocation), allowing them to locate food, potential threats, and other whales, even when visibility is low.