Daily Devotional – April 30

Botany

In the jungles of Borneo, a bat looks for a daytime place to roost. He sends out his sonar throughout the crowded jungle and finds the perfect place echoing back, a pitcher plant. Amazingly, sonic reflectors grow right above the pitcher plants opening, bouncing back the bat’s own sonar. These sonic reflectors have tiny ridges, correctly spaced for just the right reflection. So the bat quickly finds a cool, parasite-free place in the hot rainforest to roost. But what benefit is there for the pitcher plant? It gets the bat’s droppings.

Bat droppings are extremely high in nitrogen, which the plant needs. As a matter of fact, dried bat guano (droppings) is collected from caves around the world for use as fertilizer. Many pitcher plants eat insects, but not this one; it dines on the nutrients in bat waste. This mutualistic, beneficial behavior is in the category of “wacky but wonderful.” Evolutionists believe that this pitcher plant (Nepenthes hemsleyana) was not good at attracting insects, so, it evolved a sonic reflector over millions of years in order to attract a different source of nitrogen (bat droppings). Does this make any sense at all? If a pitcher plant does not get enough nitrogen in the beginning, which is why it eats insects, wouldn’t it just die? How could it change its DNA to make the exact reflector it needed? How did a plant know that a bat sent out sonar? How did a plant know that bat droppings had the nitrogen it needed? This unusual partnership was set up by God; it did not happen by accident and chance.

the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it. Consider the work of God…

~ Ecclesiastes 7:12b, 13

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

~ Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865), 16th President of the United States

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these… seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

~ Matthew 6:28-29, 33

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.