Post flood animal survival
From RationalWiki
A problem with the global flood myth as told in the Bible is that the entire menagerie Noah assembled would have died of starvation shortly after they disembarked the ark. The flood would have destroyed all available food.
Contents |
[edit] Herbivores
The herbivores among the animals would have no plants to eat.[1] Every plant would have died during the 376 day[2] flood. There is no way the animals could have remained alive long enough for the plants to grow back.
The standard creationist answer to this situation is that the herbivores ate seaweed. This claim, while looking good on the surface, carries no weight. Seaweed grows only in depths of up to 70M (in crystal clear water).[3] Since the water covered all the mountains in the entire earth[4] only the top 70 meters of the world's highest mountain would have had the sunlight required to support seaweed. Even on the top of the mountain you wouldn't find much seaweed because there is no good growing soil. This would leave us with only a tiny amount of seaweed nowhere near enough to support the thousands of herbivores on the Ark. Furthermore, no large crops of seaweed (i.e. kelp forests, etc) would have grown in just over a year. FInally, all the seaweed would have rapidly rotted away when exposed to the air, long before more plants had an opportunity to grow, assuming Noah had the forethought to collect and store seeds from the Earth's vast variety of plant life, and ignoring the fact that saltwater-saturated soil is very bad for growing most land plants.
[edit] Carnivores
The carnivores would have been in an even worse position. There would be nothing left for them to prey on except the animals Noah had saved. This would have caused mass extinction. Remember of the majority of animals ("dirty animals") only two animals of each "kind" were taken on the ark so if the carnivores had eaten even a single one a species would go extinct. The excess clean animals could have provided at best one or two meals for thousands of predators, since Answers in Genesis asserts that; "the vast majority of animals are not clean"[5]. The carnivores would in actuality have eaten all the herbivores then gone extinct themselves.
John Woodmorappe in Noah's ark:A feasibility study claims that the carnivores could have eaten the corpses of pre-flood animals.[6] This is completely impossible, since medium size corpses can fully decay under optimal conditions in 50 days,[7] while corpses underwater will decay about twice as slowly,[8] so the vast majority of the corpses would have been completely decomposed by the termination of the Ark's voyage. The picture on the right shows what happens to a chicken's corpse after just a few weeks. In any event, the carnivores would have been unable to get at any corpses because they would have been buried under sediment.
If you accept the absurd creationist concept of baraminology that means there was one pair of "great cat kind" and seven pairs of the animals they feed on "horse kind".[9] Great cats eat at least one "horse kind" every two weeks[10] so that would mean that horse kind would have been completely extincted after 3 and a half months. Even if the "horse kind" had immediately reproduced that would still be at most 28 "horse kind" which would have only provided six months of sustenance for "cat kind".
[edit] See Also
Global flood
Caring for the animals in Noah's ark
Plant survival during the global flood
