Page 80 - The Miracle In The Seed

THE MIRACLE IN THE SEED
The strangler fig tree, native to Borneo,
shares its life with a kind of wasp. The
figs provide an ideal safe shelter for the
wasp’s eggs. In return, the wasp helps
pollinate the fig by carrying the tree’s
pollen.
Strangler figs mature at the same time as
the larvae of the wasps. After weeks,
male and female wasps hatch from the
eggs. The male bites a small hole in the
flower's ovary wall. He then inseminates
the female through the hole. In the male
wasp’s short life, his last duty is to open
an exit tunnel for the female, and he usu-
ally dies as soon as he reaches the sur-
face. The female wasp is then able to
leave, and flies to another tree, carrying
pollen from her host tree. She enters a
ripe fig through an opening at the bot-
tom. In the process of laying her eggs in
the ovaries of the flowers, she pollinates
the long-styled female flowers. When the
female wasp has done her duty, she too
dies.
After a time, new wasps hatch from the
eggs she’s laid, and leave, covered in
pollen, by the tunnel previously opened
by the male wasp. And to perpetuate the
reproductive chain they move on to an-
other fig. (National Geographic,
“Borneo’s Strangler Fig Trees,” Tim
Laman, April 1, 1997, p. 41.)
The wasp can’t possibly have invented
such a complex method of its own ac-
cord or taught others how to do this. It is
perfectly obvious that the fig’s reproduc-
tive system has been specially created to
live in cooperation with the wasp.
This shows once again that this system
has been created by God and that wasps
act according to His inspiration.