Articles

Insect Metamorphosis & Evolution

By Cheri Fields

Part 1

Ever seen evolutionary drawings of an animal slowly morphing into something bigger and better? How did it grow new eyeballs, ears, or a spleen? People will tell you, “slowly, very slowly. Well, not too slowly or we would see fossils showing evolution happens. So, after around 100,000 years or so.”

To picture this, we’ll have to pretend mutations don’t always break things. Let’s look at some common insects.

A Julia Butterfly Dryas julia caterpillar. And he has a name, it’s Sir Spiney. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Have you ever raised a butterfly? Watching the change from a squirmy, fat caterpillar to a beautiful winged insect is mind-blowing. In the past, some people thought they weren’t even the same creature, but they are!

How does the caterpillar know to make the chrysalis? How can it survive when its cells are being turned to soup for the developing adult to absorb? There are some scientists who spend their whole career studying these processes, trying to better understand what’s going on and how (Butterfly scientists are called lepidopterologists [ lep-ih-dop-ter-ol-oh-gist)

When a caterpillar squeezes out of its last skin, it loses everything it once was. Its head comes completely off and every part of its body, including the legs, gets broken down to mush. All that remains are a heart and little spots called “imaginal discs” which begin to build the new adult body.

You already know how different a butterfly looks from its old body. A caterpillar can see dark and light, but a butterfly can see every color we do and more. The caterpillar has munching jaws; a butterfly has a curl-up straw to drink with. They also have long, delicate legs to taste their food with. And then there are the wings; the caterpillar didn’t have anything close to them!

The butterfly isn’t an unusual kind of bug either. Moths, flies, lacewings, caddisflies, bees, wasps, fleas, beetles, and ants all transform from larva with a wormlike body to a completely different adult.

I had to look around for a video that wasn’t about Monarchs. Much as I love them (have you ever seen their newly formed chrysalis up close? It’s one of the finest jewels in the universe!), there are 100s of other butterflies to enjoy.

Notes: watch the caterpillar squirm around as it’s chrysalis dries, it’s stretching it into the shape the butterfly needs it to be.

You will also see how the chrysalis has hints of the body and wing shapes from the beginning. It’s kind of like a shaped container making it easier on the developing bug.

Then, check out how fat the abdomen of the newly hatched butterfly is. It doesn’t stay that shape long since it quickly pumps a lot of that fluid into the wings. It’s a lot like a blow up toy, except filling with fluid instead of air. Cool stuff!

http://creationscience4kids.com/insect-metamorphosis-evolution-part-1/

Part 2 Larvae

Did you know butterflies are hardly the only kind of bug to grow with metamorphosis? Moths, flies, lacewings, caddisflies, bees, wasps, fleas, beetles, and ants all transform from larva with a wormlike body to a completely different adult.

Evolutionists have a hard time explaining such a complicated life cycle. If anything goes wrong, the bug dies without passing on its DNA to a new generation.

Here’s the only story scientists have right now to explain how an insect could go through a worm-like stage before developing into something so different: long, long ago, an insect which was supposed to stay in its egg until it looked like a tiny adult couldn’t absorb its yolk sac properly. So, it grew jaws and munched down on the leftovers.

After it hatched, it was still wormy looking but with this great new mouth it ate its way to dominance. The best part was, now it wasn’t eating the same foods as the adults, so this life cycle quickly became popular among lots of insects.  

Does this sound scientific to you?

How do you get the first caterpillar to grow a leaf munching mouth when the adult only has a straw to drink with? No one thinks you can have so many mutations at once this could happen in just one generation, so the bug would starve long before passing on its DNA.

And what about before the bug got hungry in its egg? How did those “tiny adults” grow in the first place? Such a bug would have had a hard time building up to full size on a liquid diet. If it stayed tiny, it would have had miniature eggs and in just a couple generations they’d shrink out of sight.

Some insects that grow through metamorphosis never eat as an adult. The mayfly is known to be quite low in the fossil record (which means evolutionists think it’s one of the first insects) and doesn’t eat a thing once it has wings. There is no way for it to survive without having a larval stage in place already.

Then there’s the problem of turning the caterpillar into a butterfly. If the caterpillar is just a stretched out egg stage, it wouldn’t know how to build a new protective covering for the transformation into an adult. The whole set of instructions would have to be there for the very first bug or it dies.

http://creationscience4kids.com/insect-metamorphosis-evolution-part-two/

Part 3 Wings

Another question about how these insects could have evolved is, how did the first insect develop wings in the first place? Evolutionists’ best guess on the ancestor of all winged insects is something like a silverfish. They don’t have anything close to wings!

Here’s one popular idea: An ancient insect used gills to breathe underwater. Slowly, those gills grew larger and larger until they were useful to fly with.

Can’t you picture the poor half-gilled worm? It can hardly breathe and it sure isn’t ready to fly out of the water yet. Plus, silverfish live on land and don’t even have gills.

Some Evolutionary scientists couldn’t swallow this story either and looked for something new. This time they started with another bug called a bristletail (it looks kind of like a silverfish with 3 wiggly wires on its back end).

Bristletails like to climb high in rainforest trees. Scientists have watched them drop out of the trees avoiding danger zones using those wires

They thought, If you gave them enough time, some of these bugs could move those skinny wires up to the front of the body. They could widen out and grow into two sets of proper wings. Then they could learn to pump them up and down to fly.

It’s not as wild as a half-gilled bug, but you still have a bunch of problems:

• The hairs are on the completely wrong part of the body. How do you get them to start growing in just the right place for maximum flying power?

• Any half-winged critter is going to have a lot of trouble climbing around with the extra baggage. It would be an easy target for bug eaters. Natural selection says only things useful to an organism will survive. Anything useless will be thrown out.

• You have to build a whole system of muscles, membranes, supports, and nerves before wings are of any use. The way insects fly is far more complicated than anything people have come up with.

You need a huge dose of belief to picture all the changes the bug has to go through for these things to work.

Every creature has many parts. Until each part is fully formed and the rest of the body is working with it, the part is just a drag. An organism with half-baked abilities is a dead organism.

God is powerful enough to make a creature ready to live and thrive from the very beginning. He didn’t have to invent fancy stories about how butterflies or anything else changed to fit its home so perfectly and beautifully, too.

http://creationscience4kids.com/metamophosis-evolution-part-3-wings/