Articles

The Yucca Helps the Yucca

by Bert Thompson

In the world around us, there are many examples of how one living organism helps another, so that each benefits. Scientists call this symbiosis. Sometimes one animal helps another animal; sometimes one plant helps another. And, as strange as it may sound, sometimes one plant will help an animal, or one animal will help a plant.

Consider, for example, the case of the yucca moth and the yucca plant. A female yucca moth flies into the flower of the yucca plant, where she finds pollen. She collects that pollen in special pouches on her body. She then flies away to another yucca plant. The first thing she does when she gets to this new plant is go to the base of the flower and drill a small hole. She then lays a single egg, and pokes it into that hole in the flower.

Once that is done, she then flies to the top of the flower, crawls down into it, and unloads from her pouches the pollen she collected earlier. After a short while, the flower into which she placed the pollen will then produce a large number of seeds. The yucca moth’s egg, in the meantime, has hatched and now is eating some of those seeds, which help it grow until it can fly away on its own. The rest of the yucca plant’s seeds will be scattered to the nearby ground, to become new yucca plants.

These two organisms could not exist without each other. The yucca plant must have the yucca moth to pollinate; the yucca moth must have the yucca plant in which to grow its egg. Each is dependent on the other for its existence. Evolutionists tell us that plants were produced (by accident) on the Earth long before insects. If that were true, how could the yucca plant have lived? There would have been no yucca moth to help it pollinate. But the Bible tells us that God created all things in six days (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11). The relationship between the yucca moth and the yucca plant could not have "just happened" by accident; it is too well designed. Who could have designed such a system? The Bible is clear—God did.

http://www.discoverymagazine.com/articles/d1999/d9907b.htm