Genesis Animal Sanctuary with Michael Maughon

All right, how's everybody doing tonight? Y 'all doing well? So tonight we are gonna be looking at some of the amazing design in God's animals.

So this is called Ask the Animals and it comes from a verse in Job.

It's Job 12, seven through nine. It says, ask the animals and they will teach you or the birds in the sky and they will tell you or speak to the earth and it will teach you or let the fish in the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? When you look super closely at creation, there's no way it could just happen.

And we're gonna look at some really amazing things that God put into these animals so that they can survive.

Competing worldviews. So you have created or you have not created. In the origin of the species,

Darwin said, first, why if species have descended from one another, from other species by fine gradiation, do we not see innumerable transition forms?

Why is not all nature in confusion instead of species being as we see, well -defined?

So Darwin noticed that this was a problem. He's not seeing all these transition forms that he thought he should see.

In Genesis, God says that he created the animals after their kind.

So a kind of animal is similar to the family level in our current scientific classification.

So you have your different kinds of animals and a dog kind can change and it can look different, but it's always gonna be a dog.

The cat kind is always gonna be a cat. It's not gonna go from one species to another, which is what the theory of Darwinian evolution says.

From goo to you, by way of the zoo. And it's really fun when you look at what

Darwin said and what the Bible said and what we see lines up perfectly with what

God told us in his scripture. So our first animal of the night is cracker.

Cracker is a green -winged macaw and she is perfectly designed to do what she does.

If you look at her face, you can see those feathers on her face right there.

Each green -winged macaw has a unique facial pattern of those feathers. It's like their fingerprints.

So you can look and you can tell the different birds apart by that facial pattern right there.

If you look at cracker, she looks like a rotisserie chicken. She has no feathers.

So she came out of an abuse situation where she was being neglected and she was in a really small cage.

And so when parents in captivity get stressed, they will self mutilate. They'll pluck their feathers, they'll bite their feathers, and sometimes they'll even bite their skin.

So she's been plucking for so long that she's damaged a lot of the follicles on her chest and those feathers will no longer grow back, which is pretty sad.

So she'll be naked for the rest of her life. And then it's also like a habit. If you start biting your nails, it's really hard to stop biting your nails.

And it's kind of the same with them. Once they start, it's pretty hard to get them to stop. But these guys, so some of the design features.

This beak right here is absolutely incredible. God designed them to be able to eat some of the hardest nuts on the planet.

So when you give them like a walnut, if you've ever cracked a walnut before, they're pretty hard to crack.

And she can pop it like it's nothing. Like right there, she's already into it. I don't know if y 'all can see that well.

But she's already got that nut out and she's eating it. Incredible. That's a handy nut cracker.

Yeah, yeah, incredibly powerful beak. I mean, she could break my finger with that beak if she wanted to.

Really, really powerful animal. You don't think of birds as being like super powerful, but their beak is incredible.

They can also hold their food with their hands. They're really good at climbing. And then one of the really cool things about macaws is these guys will eat unripe fruit.

So there's certain type of fruit where they're from in the Amazon, Central South America, and they'll eat this fruit and it's toxic and it'll kill them.

So they will fly to a certain mud bank along the river and they'll eat this clay.

And that clay will like absorb that acid and keep them alive. How would the first bird know how to do that?

Because if they ate that food without going and eating the clay, it would kill them.

So that's just one thing that God gave them the know -how to be able to eat this food before other animals can.

So it opens up a new food resource for this bird and then they can go eat that clay so it doesn't kill them.

Birds are probably my favorite animals. They are really, really cool.

So the macaws are really destructive. They're really loud and they're really hard pets, but they're really, really smart.

She has a pretty good vocabulary. She can say, hi, hello, cracker, what you doing? She can say all kinds of stuff, although she doesn't talk very often.

Their tail feathers are about as long as their body. So she has super long tail feathers. This is a tail feather from another bird that's about her size.

They're really, really long. Wow. She is the second largest macaw in the world, like her species, which is a green -winged macaw.

The only one that's bigger is the hyacinth macaw. Probably one of my favorite facts about birds that's just, it's incredible.

And it couldn't just evolve because if you didn't have this in place, they would die really easily.

God thought of absolutely everything when he made his creation. When you look at their wings, can

I see your wing for a second? Their wings are absolutely symmetrical. So when she holds her wings out like this, you can look at the feathers.

They're the exact same on one side as they are on the other. They're an exact mirror image. You can map them out and label them.

They're the same absolute mirror image. When they molt, so once a year, a bird, well, these guys, once or twice a year, depending on the species, will go into a molt.

And these guys shed their feathers in a pattern and they shed in matched pairs.

So here's a few that I grabbed this past week. They lose the same feather.

So if you look at these, let me set her down for a second. When you look at these, this is an exact mirror image feather.

This is from a red -fronted macaw and he's molting right now.

So he's replacing all those feathers and they'll lose one on one side. And within 48 hours, they'll lose the exact same feather on the other wing.

That is design. Time and time again, I go in and I pick out matched pairs.

Within a day or two, I'll get the same feather just from the other wing. That's incredible, guys.

God thought of everything when he designed these animals. Absolutely incredible.

So you get these matched pairs. The current thought in evolutionary theory is that birds evolved from reptiles or dinosaurs.

The feathers are assumed to have evolved out of a scale. But when you look at a feather, they are extremely, extremely complex structures.

A scale on a reptile is like a fold in the skin. So if you take like a piece of cloth and you fold it over, that's basically what a scale is.

There's no follicle. The birds have follicles.

They grow their feathers. And then they're super, super complex. So the wing feathers like this right here, it has a shaft down the middle.

Right here, it's called the rachis. And then they have two veins on each side. And then each one of these veins has like 400 barbs.

And let me see if I can get a single barb off here for you. So that right there,

I don't know if y 'all can see that. You probably can't. That's a barb right there.

Each one of those barbs have barbules. So each one of these little barbs has about 800 barbules, which stick off of it.

And on those, there's little hooklets. And so if a bird ruffs up its feather like that, it can take its beak and those hooks stick to the next feather and it has a built -in

Velcro. So God gave them a way to be able to fix those feathers. And that Velcro is microscopic structures that stick together.

If they didn't have that, they wouldn't be able to fly. I know they lose you when

I talk, as Joyce told me, but I want a quick say about the Velcro. Isn't that, didn't man take the

Velcro design from the feather? I think they took it out of nature, but I think they took it, at least one of the things

I said was, or heard, was from like cockroaches, like the little seeds that stick to you.

They have little hooks that attach to whatever brushes up against them. The reason

I think that is because I think Velcro has been around for a long time and the Velcro structures in a feather can only be seen under a electron microscope.

So they're super, super tiny, but yeah, biomimicry, they took the idea from Velcro from nature.

I don't know if it was a feather, but this Velcro is like extremely, extremely complex.

A scale is a very simple structure. So to evolve something over time like this, to get to flight when you don't have a purpose, like you're not trying to fly, it just happens.

It would never happen there. It's too perfectly designed to just happen and be perfectly symmetrical, the feathers to be perfect where they need to be, to be stiff, the wing feathers are usually stiffer and they're asymmetrical.

So if you look at this, this is the leading edge of the feather. And then this is the tailing edge.

When you look at the other feathers like this, this is a contour feather. And it is what gives them their really beautiful like shape and makes them look all slick and that aerodynamic design.

And these guys are much more symmetrical. They also have down feathers, which are like the best insulating things on the planet.

Keeps them really warm. And they're just perfectly designed. You can't get this out of a reptile.

Really awesome creature. I'm trying to think, is there any other things? Does anybody have any questions about Cracker or Macaw?

And then we'll move on. I don't want to take too much time. Okay. If anybody has a question, you can raise your hand or if nobody else is speaking.

I know I've been doing this for a while, but I've asked several questions already. And also if you're watching on Facebook, then you can type your questions into the comments and I'll be sure to ask them for you.

Thank you, Terry. Joyce, you don't have any questions?

I just like birds. Especially the birds of prey. Me too.

And I had chickens growing up and they all have their own little personality and they talk to you.

And if you raise them for babies, they will come and sit on your lap and everything. What is your bird's name,

Michael? Her name is Cracker. Cracker, that's it. Does she stay in the house or does she stay outside?

Or is she like a pet? Terry, who was just talking, her mom has turtles that come through the dog door.

That's fun. Yeah, so we, our animal sanctuary is right next to our house. So it's like a hundred feet over to our building where we keep all of our exotics.

So we don't keep animals in our house. Can Cracker fly?

She cannot fly. So if you've seen the movie, Rio, Rio couldn't fly either. She never learned how to fly,

I'm assuming. She's been in a cage her entire life and those muscles kind of atrophy. So she can, she flies like a rock.

Not very graceful. She goes straight down. Hi Cracker.

How do you wanna Cracker? But she's a super sweet bird. She's really happy now.

She is in a big aviary with one other macaw and his name is Brutus and he's a hybrid between a scarlet and a blue and gold.

They're not gonna have babies, are they? They should not. I don't think so.

Did you have a talk with them or is it just something that won't happen? Usually, so we're not trying to breed them.

So if they do, we just probably won't let their eggs hatch because their lifespan is 80 to a hundred years.

Oh yeah. It looks like Jeff, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. They just live a really long time.

And so we have 20, I wanna say 28 parrots at this point and all but one are rescues.

Oh my. And do you have somewhere set up where people can donate? I can send a link if people are interested.

Yeah, through our website, but I usually raise money as a missionary through Doe River.

Okay. And then Jeff has a question or comment. He says, I think birds are warm -blooded, at least most of them.

Can you confirm if they are cold -blooded? I also understand the female parent has the genetic variation for determining offspring male or female.

And how does that compare with reptiles? It's in the chat box too, you can say that. So these guys are warm -blooded.

And so reptiles, that's another thing that's just way far off. Their body temperature is gonna be like 105 degrees.

So they are really hot body temperatures. If you touch her, she feels really, really warm.

So most birds I believe are from like 102 to 110 degree body temperature. So they are warm -blooded and they have the fastest metabolism of any creature on earth.

So they burn through stuff really quick with flying. Whereas a reptile, like some of our snakes will go into brumation for the winter and they won't eat for four months.

And when they start eating again, they're fine. They can go a really long time without eating. These guys go for a week without eating and they're gonna die.

Maybe less than that. They get, they lose weight really, really quickly. So with a lot of our birds, sorry, we check the keel.

And if you can, there's a bone right here and you wanna make sure that that is, you can see it, but it's not like, there's actually meat right there.

If they lose that and that it's sinking in right there and you can really feel that it's really sharp, then your bird's getting a little skinny.

And when a bird gets sick, really hard to tell when they're sick, but they'll start losing weight.

So we try to keep up with that because that's the best way to tell if they get sick. And then on the other question,

I don't know how to answer that. But birds do lay eggs. I don't know about the male or female who carries what, but I can look that up.

I think that's a genetic question, a geneticist. Yeah, I'm not sure about that, but they do lay eggs and the macaws will lay them in a hollow in a nest and they guard them and their incubation.

I'm not actually sure how long the incubation is on these guys, but yeah. Okay, Michael, one more question before you move on.

From Facebook, Linda says, I understand that all birds molt in patched pairs.

Yeah, so they molt in matched pairs. So some, not all birds, but they'll molt in matched pairs.

So when they lose one feather on one side, they'll lose the same feather on the other side, which is an incredible design feature.

There are some species of, I believe, waterfowl that will molt like all their wing feathers at the same time.

So they can't fly for about six weeks. With the feathers, it's like it's keratin.

It's like a hair. So if you cut it, it doesn't hurt them. So when you hear someone like trimming a bird's wings, they'll cut these feathers so they can't fly and they won't grow back until they molt.

But if you pull a feather out, it'll grow back in six weeks. All right, any last questions on our green -winged macaw,

Cracker? I think we're ready to move on. All right, let me get our next animal.

This is Alex. Now I can get in the screen.

Ooh. Yeah, this is

Alex the owl. Alex, and yes, that is spelled O -W -L -E -X.

It is Alex. He is a Eurasian eagle owl. So this is one of the largest species of owl in the world.

And he is incredibly designed. We're going to start up at the top of his head and we'll work our way down.

If you see these little tufts sticking off of his head, those are called ear tufts. They are feathers.

They have nothing to do with hearing. His ears, if you can find the ears on your head, you can find the ears on his head.

They're going to be right there. And his facial disc channels that sound to his ear. Their hearing is about 10 times more sensitive than ours.

Really, really good hearing. So his ear is going to be right there. So these guys, the ear tuft aids in camouflage and it's also a mood indicator.

So when he gets grumpy, he'll slick those back and you can tell that he's in a bad mood.

The most notable feature of owls, usually if I ask the question like, okay, what do you notice about this bird?

Most people usually notice his eyes. Let's see if I can get him a little bit closer to the camera.

So his eyes are huge. They are massive and they're not eyeballs like we have.

They're more like eye cylinders. So they're kind of elongated and they go back into his head.

His eyeballs, if yours were the same as his, your eyes would be the size of grapefruits compared to your head.

Like crazy big eyes. And they're elongated so he can't look side to side like we can without moving his head.

So God gave him the ability to rotate that head 270 degrees. So if I'm holding him sideways like this, he can turn his head all the way around and look back at you.

That's three quarters of a turn. Really, really impressive. And they can turn their head around backwards, look up, all that stuff.

Is that from his neck muscles that makes it? I've always wanted to ask this at Dole River too.

How come they can do that? Yeah, so if you're mammals, so humans, mice, giraffes, anything has seven cervical vertebrae.

Birds have anywhere from 13 to 24 cervical vertebrae. Or yeah, 13 to 24.

These guys have 14. So he has 14 neck bones and that lets him turn his head way further than we can.

And yeah, it's the muscles too, but the neck bones help him out a lot.

The next kind of cool feature is his wings. This is probably my favorite feature about owls.

Really, really cool. They have a fringe on the leading edge of their primary feathers.

So these wing feathers right here, there's a little fringe on those feathers. And when they flap, it breaks up the air turbulence and gives them silent flight.

So these guys, he can only fly about 35 miles an hour, which isn't super fast for a bird.

But he's completely quiet. When he goes and he gets going, you can't hear him.

He's quiet. They have really soft feathers. Their feathers are a little bit more flexible than the parrot feathers.

These are pretty stiff and they make a loud noise. His are a little bit more flexible. And then that fringe, silent flight.

And then his feet. I don't know if I can get up close on his feet.

Let me see if I can do this really quick. Okay, so his feet, let's see if y 'all can see that.

His feet are incredible. He has about an inch, inch and a half long talon right there.

And his grip strength is eight to 10 times the average human.

It's about 800 pounds per square inch. Incredibly powerful feet.

They can take down anything from like a small rodent to a fox or a small deer. And their grip strength, they don't even need their talons for smaller stuff.

They hit it so hard and they squeeze it so hard that it'll usually kill it upon impact and they just will asphyxiate it with those feet.

Those talons are helpful though, they do help. Once they get their prey, if it's too big, they will tear it into little bits and they'll swallow it.

If it's a small like rat, they can swallow it whole and they don't digest the bones in the fur.

So in their stomach gets coated with a slick coating and they vomit up those bones and fur into what they call an owl pellet.

But it's a good design because it is coated in something and that way when they vomit it up, it's not scratching their esophagus.

Really, really cool design. I know a lot of, like as a former homeschool mom, that we dissected out an owl pellet.

Like that's a pretty common thing that you can buy them as specimens and see what the owl ate and vomited back up.

Yeah, so you can dig through the owl pellet and you can see what the owl's been eating and they will throw up that owl pellet before they eat again to make room for it.

These birds, I didn't point it out on Cracker but she had a big ball on her throat and that was her crop.

It's kind of like a food storage container. Owls do not have that.

So their food goes straight into their stomach, they digest it and then they throw up that owl pellet. Yeah, does anybody have any questions about Alex the owl?

I do. So that owl pellet, is there any kind of nation on earth that makes it into tea?

I know the Chinese make a lot of things into tea, like in coffee. That's a good question.

So I don't know who did this, but some scientists were researching it and they like tasted it.

So that like outer coating is sweet, that slick coating that's on that pellet.

So they potentially could, but I do not know the answer to that question. That's okay, because I think in South America, there's a rodent that eats coffee beans and then it passes it and then they collect up the past coffee bean and they make, and I didn't know, but it does taste very good.

So I was just wondering if there was like an owl pellet tea or, okay. So next question. Well, Bill wants to know if he is nocturnal only.

So this particular species of owl is crepuscular or crepuscular, which means they're active at dusk and dawn.

So the twilight hours of the day is his preferred hunting time. They will hunt during the day and they will hunt at night, but their typical time is going to be that dusk and dawn twilight hours.

Rachel says she's seen owls in the daytime sitting on power lines. Yep. So a lot of people think that when an animal is nocturnal, that it doesn't come out during the day or it sleeps all day.

He's pretty active during the day. He comes out and he'll fly around and check things out in his aviary.

So they do come out during the day and I've seen owls hunting during the day. It's just not their norm.

They're normally gonna hunt at night because during the day, they don't have the advantage of stealth. Their eyes are so big that they have incredible low light vision and then they're quiet.

They can't, most of the stuff that they eat is dead before they even know what got them because they're ambush predators.

So their best time to hunt is at night or those twilight hours, but that doesn't mean they won't hunt in the day.

And what is this guy's name again? His name is Alex and he is a Eurasian owl.

And why is he at the rescue? So this is one of our ambassador animals.

So our main focus at the rescue is education. So certain species we do go and purchase for teaching.

He sure is beautiful. Anybody have any other questions? Nothing from Facebook right now.

Okay. So we were working with local species of owls.

I was working with a wildlife rescue and in that wildlife rescue, we were working with some like great horned owls and different stuff and they were a lot harder to work with.

They were wild and they're hard to tame down and they would get stressed if you used them a lot.

And one of the owls that we worked with was very foul tempered and she would like just try to kill you any chance she got.

And this glove right here is three layers of cowhide. It's a really thick glove and a great horn's grip strength is about 500 pounds per square inch.

And my wife was manning this bird and it grabbed her, it footed her and it bruised her hand through the glove.

That's how powerful these guys are. Wow. Just amazing, amazing birds.

But when you look at them, they're very specifically designed. This did not just happen out of a reptile.

This was a designed animal. God put in all these features to this animal. And as much as they breed, they might change in appearance a little bit, but it's always gonna be an owl.

This is part of the owl kind. And he's never not gonna be an owl.

No matter how much time passes, you can give him 13 billion years or whatever you want to and he's still gonna be an owl because that's what

God designed him as. I have a quick question along that line.

Now, you can breed horses and zebras. Can you breed owls with anything else?

I mean, what can it? So great question. So that is along the created kinds.

So your horses, your zebras, your donkeys are all in the same created kind. So they can breed together.

So you could breed him with a different species of owl. Like I could probably breed him with a great horned owl and I would get a hybrid, but it would still be an owl.

So we have hybrid macaws where people take the different species and they breed them together to get something that looks different.

But it's always a macaw, same with dogs. There's 500 breeds of dog, but they're all dogs.

Okay, yeah, I was just wondering because like you said, you can take, I've seen ducks that have intermingled and they look weird, but they're still ducks, of course.

Yeah, and so there's usually a limitation on that. Usually a lot of the hybrids become sterile and can't reproduce.

There's a case, you can get tribrids occasionally, but a lot of times I believe

God put boundaries on that. How much a species can interbreed with the same kind, but different species, just because genetics can start getting messed up.

How much does Owolex weigh? He looks hefty. Yeah, he's a pretty big bird, but he only weighs five pounds.

So God designed this bird for, or birds in general, for flight. So they're super lightweight.

Feathers are like a foam -filled tube, that shaft, and they're really lightweight, they're flexible and strong.

Their bones are hollow and they have struts going through them and it makes them lightweight, but they're still strong.

And with their bones, the avian lung system, I'm not trying to go into a ton of detail, but is super complex and it's unique to the animal kingdom.

And they have air sacs on their lungs. So when they breathe in, it goes through their lung and into the air sacs.

And some of those air sacs go in between the muscles, some of them go into the bones. And so they basically have a one -way breathing system.

Every time they breathe, they're getting fresh air in their lungs. Well, he looks like he weighs about 15 pounds.

Yeah, my average guess is about 25 when I'm doing classes. He's a pretty big bird.

He has about a five -foot wingspan and he weighs about five pounds. And then can you train him to do any kind of tricks?

Like, does he have a motivation? Like, is he food motivated or something that you can like find rewards to train him?

Yeah, so you can like train these guys. So you can train them to fly like to and from. And he is food motivated.

So with birds of prey, you're training them with food. That's what they want. Owls in particular, they're a little bit stubborn and they're harder to train.

There's the wise old owl saying, owls are one of the stupidest birds of prey I have ever worked with.

They're like that dumb jock. You know, they're like perfect for what they do and they do not seem that smart.

I mean, he's maybe smarter than we give him credit for. What was that? But compared to like some of the hawks and falcons, he's not as smart.

And the parrots are crazy smart. So he's like the cat of the mammal world?

Yes, yes, he is. He is a cat. Like the birds wanna please you. Like our green -winged macaw right now is flapping her wings because she wants me to pick her up.

She wants to hang out with me. He doesn't care. He's fine being with me.

He is fine not being with me. So yeah, did that answer your question?

Yes, yes it did. Thank you. He's so cute. Yeah. And so basically with him, for what we're doing, since we teach with kids and we like people to get really close to him, we basically just reinforce him staying on the glove so that he doesn't fly away.

Because sometimes it can get hard if you train a bird to fly and to sit. It takes a lot more upkeep because when you take him out, they'll wanna go flying.

And so we basically just, we fly him occasionally, we take him out, but typically we just keep him on the glove when he comes out.

You can just put a string on his leg and fly him like a kite? Basically, yeah. It's called a creance.

And so we fly him on a long line. So it's about a hundred feet. And so we'll fly him.

And then if he deviates, you just put a little bit of pressure on it and he'll slowly land.

So, yeah. That's Alex the Owl. Any last questions before I pass him off?

I think we're good. Quickly, do these birds drink water normally? They do drink.

They do drink, but he doesn't seem like he drinks as much as some of our other birds. I think they get a lot of their moisture through food, but he does drink.

So they'll put their beak in and they'll pull their head up. So they drink like a bird, but I don't see him.

I've only seen him drinking, I think once in three years. So, but he probably drinks at night, but yeah, they don't seem to drink as much as the parrots do.

Okay, thank you very much. Oh, well, all my stuff just went everywhere.

All right. So is there any last questions on the birds before I move on?

Oh, I think we're good. Yeah, I think we're ready. We're on the edges of our seats. So the next species

I have for you is one of my favorites. They're really cool. And this is the largest species of gecko in the world.

So this is only about a 14 month old. So he'll probably get twice this size.

This is a New Caledonian Giant Forest Gecko. Most people call them

Leachianus geckos or a leachie. So they're Raggedactilus leachianus.

And so most people refer to them as a leachie. These guys are incredibly designed.

They're from New Caledonia, which is an island off the coast of Australia. And they're just really, really cool animals.

These guys get huge for geckos.

They get really chunky and there's a bunch of different localities. So depending on where on the islands or different islands that you find one of these guys, they'll have different patterns and they'll have different head shapes.

Some of them will have like a more bulldog, thick appearance. Some of them will be longer and skinnier.

So there's quite a bit of variation within this particular species, but they're really cool.

If they lose their tail, they can grow it back. So if a predator gets after them, they'll drop that tail and they can grow it back.

But the most notable feature of geckos is their feet. Their feet are designed to a

T. If you have part of their feet, they don't work. So these guys, where did my little card go?

These guys have little ridges on their feet. I don't know if you can see that card, but those little ridges are called lamellae.

And each one of those is a cluster of tiny microscopic hair -like structures called setae.

Those hair -like structures are about a thousandth the size of your hair.

And then each one of them has split ends. So those split ends act on molecular forces called van der

Waals forces. And there are so many of them that that attraction between molecules adds up and gives them enough to support themselves.

They have crazy, crazy grip strength. A lot of animals have claws and they're really good at climbing.

These guys, they have tiny little claws, plus they have these suction cups where they can hang on just about any surface.

They can walk on glass. They can stick to just about any surface.

And with those, God designed their feet really, really specially.

So when they, let me set him down for a second. When their foot is stuck to something, they have to rotate those feet off.

So they are like, fingers are stuck. They rotate their toes up to peel off those sticky pads.

If they didn't have that and they had those sticky pads, the attraction is so great that they wouldn't be able to pick their foot up.

And they would step and they would get stuck and they would die. So even if they had all the features, if it evolved and they had those features, but they didn't have the neuromuscular stuff to go along with it, they wouldn't function.

If it didn't have the split ends, it wouldn't function. That is something that could not have evolved.

They're too perfect to just be an accident, too perfect.

All right, another, what was that? He's pretty chunky.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, there he goes. And he looks wrinkly. Yeah, they're wrinkly.

They have a lot of wrinkles on their side. The video is not the greatest and I apologize.

No, I've got a good picture and I can even see inside his head there. There's a hole there, isn't there? Yes, there is.

That is his ear. So we'll talk about that here in a little bit. But these guys, they're gonna eat mainly insects and fruit.

And they can eat small, they'll eat other lizards and they can eat small mammals and stuff, but their main diet, depending on the time of year, is insects and fruit.

But these feet, I wish I could get a closeup for you guys of his actual feet, but they are absolutely incredible.

When you hold one of these, they're really soft. His feet feel like velvet. And then when you turn them upside down, like, ah, they can hang from one foot if they want to.

Like, just absolutely crazy, crazy animal. Let me see if I can.

His face almost looks like an alligator face. Yeah, they have a big, bulky, like, bulldog -like head.

And I think they have a pretty strong bite from what I've been told. I've never been bit by one of these, but yeah.

And then this is what the bottom of their feet looks like. Like a tread on a shoe.

Yeah, and so each one of those little lines that you see is bundles of millions of tiny hairs.

That have split ends. And that's what allows them to suction cup to just about any surface.

Yeah, and then their camouflage is pretty incredible too. And this species is nocturnal. So you are going to find these guys at night.

All right, does anybody have any questions about our leachianus gecko?

Oh yes, we have questions. And I want to make a mention, you're holding up those cards.

So I put a link in Facebook for how people can get their own set of the incredible animals cards.

And then I'm also posting that into the chat here on Zoom. I think they're made by creationproclaims .com,

is that right? So I put a link there. So those cards are pretty cool. I've had some before too.

Yes, if you haven't had these cards, absolutely incredible. I recommend them. They have them for all different types of animals.

Yeah, okay. Proclaim, go on. Bill's asking if it's an amphibian or a reptile.

This is a reptile. So these guys are cold -blooded along with amphibians, but these guys are a reptile.

They do have scales on their back and all over their body. And their scales are like little bumps.

They're a little bit different than scales you see on other reptiles. And Jeff is asking about the skeleton when it grows back, is it just cartilage, his tail, when he loses his tail and it grows back, is it just cartilage or real bone?

The bone doesn't grow back. So their tail will look different if they lose it, but it does come back.

So, but yeah, it's just gonna be the cartilage and the muscle. So, and they also have those seti on the end of their tail.

So the end of their tail is grippy so they can grab on with it. And you're saying that he is both soft and scaly at the same time?

Yeah, they're, when you feel his back, he is, he has kind of a bumpy texture, but they're pretty soft and his feet feel like velvet.

When they step on you, their feet are so soft. Interesting. Does, Cheryl on Facebook wants to know if he makes sounds?

He does. So this is one of the most vocal species of gecko out there. Most reptiles don't really make noise.

These guys are actually pretty vocal. Okay, and then also on Facebook, Linda says

Van D. Wall's forces are based on molecular polarity. Do their hairs use the same type of polarity or is the force based on something else?

Yeah, so I would say, yes, they're attracted to other, I don't know if I exactly know how to answer that question to be completely honest.

But they are attracted to other atoms and molecules. So they are suctioning to the molecular structures of other things.

And there's so many of them. It's very, very loose, tiny forces, but there's millions and millions and millions of them on their feet.

And so that adds up and lets this pretty big lizard be able to stick and hang upside down on stuff.

I hope that answers your question. I think so,

I hope so. Okay, that's all the questions so far. Robin asked about the study, but Robin, you heard him say that when the tail grows back, it does have them, right?

Oh no, I didn't, but okay. Okay, I think that's all for now. We can move on.

Alrighty. So this is the Leachianus gecko. I don't like any reptile.

What? They're so incredible. All right, so we're gonna move on to our next little critter.

How's my time? Okay, speed up. All right, so with the incredible design of a gecko foot and the incredible design of lizards, the thing that supposedly evolved from a lizard is a snake.

So these guys are so different from a lizard. They are incredible.

This is a ball python. This is the smallest species of python and they are found in Africa.

These guys have heat sensing pits. So one of the way they find their food is there's little holes along that lip and that lets them see infrared.

So they can see the body heat of animals while they're hunting at night. And really, really incredible.

They have a skeleton. A lot of people think snakes don't have a skeleton because they can fold, but they have basically a vertebrae and a bunch of ribs.

One of the coolest things about these guys is how they eat. So these guys can't rip their food apart because they don't have legs.

So they have to be able to swallow stuff whole. So with this guy, we feed him something.

If you can see the size of his head and you can see the size of his body, it's a lot thicker.

And we feed him something about the middle of his body. It's about five times the size of his head and he can swallow it because God designed them with ligaments in their jaw.

If we open our mouth as wide as we can, it stops. These guys can dislocate their jaw because they have that ligament attaching it.

And then the front right here of their jaw is also a ligament.

So it can open up and they can move each jaw independently. Let me set him down for a second.

So when they're eating, they can work their food into their mouth and they can swallow something five times the size of their head.

Really crazy. They have a slow metabolism. This guy usually eats once a week.

Sometimes he'll eat once every two weeks and that's enough to keep him pretty chonky and healthy.

But these guys are a constrictor. They're not venomous. So they'll bite onto their prey. Their teeth in their mouth are curved back in their mouth.

So when they grab on, it's really hard to get away from these guys. They grab on, they'll wrap around it.

They'll throw some coils around it and then they'll squeeze it and suffocate it. And then they'll swallow it typically head first.

They'll go and they'll find the head. They'll swallow it. And that way their arms and legs and everything, the fur lays down against the body and it makes it easier for them to eat.

These guys are cold blooded. Just like the gecko.

And that means that they are gonna control their body temperature by their behavior. So if they're cold, they're gonna go find a spot and sun.

And if it gets really hot, they're gonna go into the shade. And these guys prefer their temperature between like 70 and 89 is typically where we keep them.

I keep these guys at 85 degrees in their warm area. Is that to that particular snake?

Cause we've got a lot of snakes in Florida and it's always much hotter than that. Yeah, so they can vary in temperature, but if it gets really hot, so these guys are from Africa.

They're like equatorial Africa where it gets really hot. So when it gets hot, they're gonna go into a burrow.

These guys, they'll go into termite mounds and that's usually where they'll make nests and they'll lay their eggs.

And their incubation is about 59 days. And they'll lay a clutch of probably up to 10 eggs.

And they're like a leathery soft egg. And then they'll hatch out into babies and you'll get more baby ball pythons.

Okay, I have a question about the eating. So you said that you can feed him something that's up to about like five times the size of his body.

Is that right? Excuse my puppy. She doesn't know that she's prey right now for that snake.

But that's kind of my question is how does he know, like, is that something

God just taught him, like ingrained in him that he knows he better not try to eat anything that's bigger than that?

Like what stops him from eating you? Does he know, like, how does he know what's in his range?

And does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. And so I think they can size up their prey. I think God gave them that ability.

If they try to eat something that is too big, they, once they get it, they will regurgitate it.

But I've never had a snake that I've put something in its cage that they couldn't eat.

And I've given this guy some like big rats. So his rat will be like as thick as that part of his body and he can swallow it just fine.

And so as long as you keep feeding him, he won't try to eat you. Is that your thinking or does he, he distinguishes between what's prey and what's taking care of him?

Usually, yes. So there's different habits that we have when we're working with these guys to try to minimize how many times we get bit.

They are a wild animal. So sometimes they'll just bite you for the heck of it. And you're like, why did you do that?

But a bite from one of these is typically not that bad. It's, I'd probably rather get bit by him than stung by a bee, to be completely honest.

These things hurt a lot more. These guys, I mean, you get a few little pinpricks and it's not that big of a deal.

But usually, so when they're eating, we size their food for them so that we don't overfeed them.

In the wild, if they kept something too big, they'd probably just leave it. But I think they can size that up to make sure that they're not spending energy where they don't have to.

And yeah, that answered my question. And do snakes dig holes,

Robin's asking. So these guys are gonna move into already dug holes. So they're gonna find a burrow that something else made and they're gonna move into that.

So like, usually this species is gonna be, they like termite mounds. So something that's kind of already been excavated.

What's the word? Yeah, excavated is the word. They wouldn't eat the termites in there.

How did the termites feel about sharing their home? I think they're fine with it, but these guys will eat the rodents out of the termite mounds.

Oh, okay. And then these guys, you can kind of see the folds in the skin right there.

So it's keratin, it's the same material as your fingernails. And that's what their scales are made out of.

And it's hard and it keeps water in them. That's kind of their armor. So with the ball pythons, this is probably the most popular pet snake in the

United States currently. So people - I can assure you, I would never have a snake.

I would never. Yeah, people are breeding these guys. So when we talk about genetic variation, if you see, this is another snake right here.

So this is the one I was just talking about. This lighter color one has a mutation.

So these mutations occur in the wild. It's just rarer to find a snake like this in the wild.

So people have taken the snakes that look different in the wild and they breed them in captivity to produce all kinds of crazy looking snakes.

But in all of that, when you see these mutations, it's a loss in genetic information. For evolution to be true, you need a gain in information.

And so evolution, we're decreasing genetic information, whereas we need to be gaining it to get to a new species, but that's not what you see.

You see this loss in information. And so this guy is called a lesser ball python and they have this kind of golden, a lot lighter tint.

And then we're going to grab a third one right here just to kind of show you some of the mutations that are out there for different animals.

So this right here, I don't know if y 'all can see that. Let me back up a little bit.

Can y 'all see that okay? Yeah, that's better. Okay, so this guy right here is called a piebald ball python.

So he has, part of his body is solid white. He's lost all the information.

So if I gave you a coloring book and I was like, hey, color all these things. And I just left out one of the sections.

That's kind of what happened with this guy. He just lost all that color in part of his body.

So you can see that pattern right there. And then that solid white section right there.

So it wasn't a dye job gone bad. It wasn't a dye job gone bad. This is a really cool mutation and people think it looks really pretty.

So they breed it and they try to keep it going. So with this, the piebald mutation, it can cover 10 % of their body.

It can cover 90 % of their body. So they're all kind of unique looking snakes. Really, really cool.

But most of these mutations are gonna be harmful in the wild because it's gonna make them a lot easier to see when they're out than about.

And are they more sensitive to sun? So some of them like albinos, they don't have the pigment in their eye and they are a lot more sensitive to sun and they can go blind a lot quicker.

And then in birds that are albino, the melanin that they don't have is it adds structure to their feathers.

So their feathers will wear out quicker than a normal bird. So with this guy, the albino affects the entire animal and they're just gonna lose the melanin which is those brown and black pigments.

So if you ever see an albino, one of these, they're gonna be yellow and white.

Whereas the leucistic and the piebald mutation causes them to be solid white.

When you feed them, do you feed them live animals or dead animals? So we feed them dead, which can be tricky with the ball python.

Cause like I was saying, either they hunt with those heat sensing pits. So sometimes you have to trick them.

So most of these guys, you have to heat the mouse up. So we have, we buy our mice frozen and then we thaw them out to room temperature and then we shock them in water.

So we put them in hot water for like 30 seconds to get them up to like a body temperature, 98, 100 degrees.

And then we feed them. With a lot of our, some of them will eat them at room temperature, but a lot of our ball pythons, they'll strike at them and they'll miss if they're not hot.

So you'll see them strike out and they can't grab onto it because it's not, they can't see it with those heat pits.

But with all this, these guys are all ball pythons. And as much as you breed them, they've been breeding these things for years now and they've never produced a snake that's not a ball python.

They can make them look different. God gave them incredible, incredible genetic diversity, but they're always going to stay within their kind.

They're always going to be a python. I have the same question about the snakes as I did about Owly.

Can like different snakes, would they even be interested in going outside their breed?

Could you do a rattler and a ball python? You could not do a rattler and a ball python because they would be different kinds of snakes.

They'd be in the different families, but there are some like hybridizing with like ball pythons.

And I think they do a ball python and a reticulated python is one hybrid

I've heard of. I've never seen one, but I think it is possible to hybridize them, but it's not super common.

A lot of the pythons get really, really big, like 30 feet and breeding with a smaller snake is probably not going to happen.

Oh, makes sense. Thank you. So, but these guys, how big are they? Are snakes cannibalistic?

Like would they eat a smaller snake? Depending on the species. So your king snakes, so like king cobra or we have in Florida, there's a few different species of king snake.

Up here, there's a few different species of king snake and they do eat other snakes. And so with the king snakes and the milk snakes, they'll even eat venomous snakes and they're highly immune to venom so that if they get bit, it won't kill them.

But for the ball pythons, typically they're not going to eat each other. That's why

I would hold them together. Some of our other snakes, I don't hold them. I wouldn't hold two snakes in the same hand.

Another thing I was going to talk about earlier is if you look at the side of his head, he doesn't have an external ear opening.

So that's one of the main differences between lizards and snakes. If snakes don't have that external ear opening, they have a little eardrum attached to their jaw and they sense vibrations.

So if you ever see an animal that has no legs but it has ear holes, it's a legless lizard or a dead snake.

Yeah, any last questions about our ball pythons? I don't think so.

I think we got them all answered throughout. Right.

Let me put these guys up. They're going to go back outside, right?

Yeah, they'll go back into... I'm going to put the snake up, it's not cooperating. All right, so we got one more animal and he's pretty cool.

So according to evolutionary theory, this is the closest or this animal's closest living relative is birds.

Anybody want to take a guess on what it is? You have a dinosaur? A fish? A fish.

Good guesses. Oh, I remember somebody saying it.

It's something that you wouldn't think of. It's like some kind of rodent, I think. You're right,

Joyce. I've heard it too and I can't think of... The alligator.

He's cute. He is. So this is Bubbles. And Bubbles is a

Cuvier's dwarf, or Cuvier, I believe is how you say it. A Cuvier's dwarf caiman.

And this is the smallest species of crocodilian in the world. So he is a few years old.

We don't exactly know how old he is, but I want to say he's two, two and a half, maybe three.

And these guys max out at about five feet. And they're from Central and South America.

These guys are really, really incredible. If you look at his eyes and his nose, they're both high set on his head.

And that allows him to sneak up on his prey so he can submerge his entire body and he can stick his eyes out so he can see and his nose out so he can breathe.

When they go into the water, God gave them so many perfect features.

Their nose, they have muscles and flaps that can shut. Their ears, which are right behind,

I don't know if y 'all can see that, but right behind his eyeball, there's a little slit.

And that's his ear. Let me see if I can point it out without him freaking out. No, we can see it.

And that was a good, uh -huh. That was a good closeup. All right, so that is his ear.

He can also shut that off so he doesn't get water in his ear. And then his throat, he has a flap in the back of his throat and that flap he shuts so that he can catch his food underwater.

So he shuts that off. If he didn't have that flap and he tried to grab a fish underwater, his lungs and stomach would fill up with water.

He has to have all these features to be able to catch his food by ambush and then to be able to go underwater and not get water in every hole in his body.

God thought through everything. These guys are considered to be the closest or their closest living relative is supposed to be birds.

I'm gonna dispute that and say, there is no way that the closest thing to this is a bird.

Really, really, really different animal. These guys are cold -blooded. They have true teeth.

They have a ton of teeth. Their eyeballs are just completely different than most birds.

You can see those nice slits right there. Their nose, obviously you don't even see that, sticks up so they can breathe underwater.

Their back, God gave this animal some amazing protection.

And so a lot of species of crocodilian are hunted for their skin. These guys are not.

They have a ton of osteoderms. So these scutes on their back, there is bony plates and they're extremely hard when you touch them.

He has bony plates called osteoderms all over his body and it ruins the tanning process.

Like if you kill one of these guys for their hide, it's nearly impossible to tan their hide. So not only is that protection from animals, but it's also protection from people trying to use these guys to make handbags because they can't tan the hide because there's so many osteoderms in their skin.

Go on. Is he making noises? He is not.

That is the macaw. Oh, okay. So I feel like every time that I'm saying wow with my microphone off,

I hear your bird saying something too. Like he's going, wow. Yeah, she's been making noise.

But now that he's so tame, this guy that you're holding, he seems like really chill.

Is that because you know where to, where his pressure points are to keep him tame and how much bigger will he get that, that then you'll say it's too, it's too big.

I can't keep holding him like this. So hopefully he'll never get too big that we can't hold him like this.

He is, this is probably the only animal that we have that makes me nervous to handle.

So he's gotten me once, but his teeth are razor sharp. And so when he grabs onto you, he didn't even grab onto me.

He just hit me with his tooth one time and he cut me open pretty good. We've been working with him quite a bit.

We've had him about a year. And so we've been working with him, trying to get him calmed down so that we can use him in our programs.

Is he a rescue? Yeah, he came from some people in Tennessee. You can own caimans and someone ordered him off the internet for their turtle tank and then didn't want him anymore because they're hard to handle.

They ate his, their turtles? They ate his turtles. They can cohabitate, but I think it was just a little too much for them.

These guys do not make good pets for sure. And most of the animals that I've brought out today, just, they don't make good pets.

These guys are hard to deal with. They get, I mean, five feet. His next enclosure is gonna be quite a bit bigger, but his final enclosure is gonna be huge and it's gonna take a lot of space to house this guy, but they grow really slowly, thankfully.

So we have a little bit of time to build it. Does the pace of their growth depend on how much you feed them?

Like with tortoises, they're the same. They're like that, right? Yeah, so, I mean, if they have a good food source, they are gonna grow faster.

These guys only grow about four inches a year, typically though. So it takes them like eight to 10 years to reach a sexual maturity size.

Yeah, and his mouth is open right now. So I'm gonna let y 'all look in his mouth. And if you look, you can't see a throat.

Back up just a little bit. Oh yeah, perfect, right there. Oh yeah, it looks like it's cocked over or something.

Yeah, and so that's that flap that he shuts so he can catch food underwater. And so he can completely seal that off so that he can catch food and he doesn't get any kind of water down in his stomach or lungs.

Put your finger in there so we can see what happens. Oh, that's a great idea. Why don't

I do that? It would hurt a lot for sure.

These guys like to eat crustaceans, fish, small mammals. And then they're a bit more terrestrial than most species of crocodilians.

So most crocodilians have webbed feet. These guys do not. So they do spend quite a bit of time on land, but they'll be found next to like rivers, swamps, lakes in Central and South America.

And don't say this about reptiles, but he is cute. He has a very nice profile. Oh, thank you.

He almost looks like he'd be friendly, but I guess not. He is not friendly for sure.

Does anybody have any questions about bubbles? The Cuvier dwarf caiman, the smallest species of crocodilian in the world.

What do you feed him? So we feed this guy, he gets a rotated diet.

So he gets salmon, tilapia, trout are the fishes that we typically feed him.

And we feed him shrimp and then he gets mice. So we rotate through those three different food groups and he eats twice a week.

And it took about six months to train him. But when we feed him, I can kind of call him over to the edge of the tank.

They're pretty smart and he'll come over and he'll sit there and wait for me. And then as soon as I put the food in with some tongs, he'll jump up and grab it.

Now, does he, you know, like dogs and other animals, you can tell kind of like what they're feeling or like what their temperament is at the moment based on certain signs.

So we see his mouth open a lot right now. Is this a sign that he's not very happy or what is he expressing?

Yeah, so typically that's gonna be, he is not happy, which is pretty much his temperament always.

He is never very happy it seems. He's pretty grumpy. He makes hisses.

So when he gets mad, he'll piss. And then if you scare him, he'll make that,

I don't know how to make the noise, but he'll make that like baby crocodile grunting sound to call his mom.

So these guys are, crocodilians are actually really good mothers. They will watch after their young, which is rare among reptiles for the first bit of their life to try to keep them alive.

And has he been domesticated too much now that you would never be able to put him in the wild or someday could you?

I doubt it. So most of the time they, these guys are not endangered or anything. So they would never release him.

And then a lot of times, at least with like parrots, it's bad to release like a captive bred parrot in the wild.

One, they have to be trained on what foods to eat. This guy, if you let him go, I bet he would thrive.

But sometimes they can have disease from being in captivity and you can introduce it to a population.

So he will be in captivity for the rest of his life. That makes sense.

My mom, Robin mentioned my mom has turtles and tortoises. It's the tortoises that like to come in the pet door.

Although the turtles, they'll get out of their, she's got this big tub. They can jump out, but they can't get back in.

So they're girls and they like to go find places to lay eggs. And when they're ready to get back in, they know to come up toward the door to get us to go and put them back in there.

I mean, they understand that we're taking care of them and stuff, but tortoises, she has

California desert tortoises and they're prone to upper respiratory issues. So that is something that, so are your other reptiles or is this guy prone to that kind of thing too?

Like the diseases you talked about? So to be honest, I don't know what these guys are prone to.

I know some of the stuff they can get, but I don't know anything that's like super common. And with these guys, it's really hard when they get sick because it's hard to tell what's wrong.

And then there's not very many vets that actually work with stuff where we are. So we have to go to a university about two hours away when something like this gets sick.

But I don't know what these guys are prone to, but yeah, we do have like tortoises and different snakes and they'll have like things that they're prone to.

I don't know if y 'all heard that. That's his put me up, dad. Can you growl one more time for us?

But yeah, so when you see another thing that these guys have before I put them up is they have a third or a second eyelid called a nictitating membrane.

So they can shut that and it acts like goggles while they're underwater. Really, really cool.

We had somebody talked about animals and when the eye is like a slit like that, it's a predator.

And then if it's big and round, it's a prey. Did you ever hear that? Yeah, so typically your predators are gonna have eyes that are facing forward.

The slit on the eye typically is going to be whether they're nocturnal or diurnal, whether they're gonna be up in the night or the day.

So these guys are a nocturnal species and they have that slit cat eye. The diurnal species are gonna have typically a round eye.

And then a lot of times when you have the forward facing eyes, so if you looked at the owl versus the macaw, the macaw, his eyes are set on the side of his head and he can see almost 360 degrees.

Like he has a blind spot right in front of his beak and then if you're directly behind the bird, they can't see you.

But everywhere else they can see you. Whereas the owl, his eyes are locked forward and that's typical of predators.

They're gonna have those eyes that are facing forward. Okay, that was Bill Morgan.

He said, eyes in front, I like to hunt. Eyes on side, I like to hide. So yeah, that makes sense.

I couldn't remember, but I appreciate that, Terry. Thank you. I think he went to take

Bubbles, put him away. Is Bubbles a boy or a girl? Or does he not identify as either and he's non -binary?

So with the crocodilians, you cannot tell by looking at them currently.

So you have to like probe them. So you have to put something in their cloaca to tell whether it's a male or a female.

I don't know and I don't really need to know for what I'm doing. So I was told, but I don't know.

I was just curious. Yeah, so these guys are really cool.

So on the non -binary, there is only male and female. So for all of you guys who might wanna know,

God created a male and female, science has confirmed that there's male and female and those are the only two options. If you don't like it,

I'm sorry. This right here is the skull of about an eight foot

American alligator. And so with the alligators, you can see those teeth. This is gonna be about three feet longer as far as like body length than a

Cuvier dwarf caiman can even get. And then with the alligators, that top row of teeth is gonna be on the outside and the bottom row is gonna go inside the top teeth.

If you have a crocodile, you're gonna see the bottom teeth sticking up too.

So they're gonna both be on the outside. There's a rescue here in Florida called

Homosassa Springs and they take in alligators. But one time they took in a crocodile and the rescue were told that they could put the crocodile in with the alligator, but it turns out the crocodile was attacking the alligators.

Is that a normal thing? So there's only like, I think the only place in the world that crocodiles and alligators co -exist is

South Florida. And there's so much space that they typically don't get into altercations from what

I am aware, but that's, I wouldn't recommend putting the two different species together because crocodiles are typically significantly more aggressive than alligators.

And they wouldn't interbreed, right? That they're different kinds? They would be,

I believe they would be in the same kind of animal. I could be wrong on that.

I don't have like breeding proof, but I would imagine that you could crossbreed.

You can definitely do crocodile to crocodile. I know that there's a lot of different crocodile to crocodile species, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were the same biblical kind, but don't quote me on that because I don't know that for a fact.

Oh, well, Terry says there's a crocogator. I didn't say that.

I'm just saying, is that what we would call it? Probably, it wouldn't surprise me if they could hybridize.

I don't know of any cases that they have though, but they will breed and a lot of like zoos and people will have hybrid crocodiles that I've seen.

And then scale of the skeleton you were showing us, is that a real one or is that a pretend one?

This is a real American alligator skull. That's big.

I've yet to see an alligator in the wild here in Florida. Oh, Diane has a question.

Her hand is up. I raised my hand like a good little girl. Actually, you got me curious.

So I Googled it. And sadly for mad scientists everywhere, the answer to this question is no.

According to location, both alligators and crocodiles fall into the crocodilia order, but they're not closely related enough to interbreed.

So Google speak. Okay, and we have a question from Bob.

He says with such razor sharp teeth, how do the crocodiles and alligators not cut their own jaws when biting?

So that's a great question. So these guys, let me see if I can find an example on here. So with like crocodiles and stuff, they will have a hole in top of their mouth.

So like right here, they'll wear a hole where their tooth goes through their skull to come out.

So these guys, let me see if you can see it. I don't know.

You can kind of see right here where their canines go in the top of the jaw.

There's like a divot right there. And so their tooth will set right there.

And their teeth are pretty sharp, but they, I mean, God designed them so that they have little spots for each one of their teeth to go.

And they can replace their teeth like up to 50 times each in a lifespan. So if they lose a tooth, they can replace it.

Is that, are there other animals that you know of that can do that? Sharks can replace teeth.

Snakes can replace teeth. Like venomous snake have their fangs and they usually have backup fangs.

So they can replace those fangs. When I was a kid, I was like 10, there was a dead rattlesnake and we went and we were like messing with it.

And it had, we found four fangs. Jeff is wondering if rodents can also replace their teeth.

They do. That's a good question. So a lot of rodents, their teeth continually grow.

So I'd imagine unless you get like a ton of damage, they might not replace it, but they grow continuously.

That's why rodents chew on stuff because they have to keep those down. If you lock a rodent up and it can't chew, its teeth will grow out of its mouth and it'll kill it.

So we've worked with rescue like groundhogs and stuff that can't chew because they have brain damage and you have to file their teeth for them.

So we would have to anesthetize it and like clip its teeth and file them down so that his teeth didn't get too long because they would just continue to grow where he couldn't even shut his mouth.

That is so sad that he would be brain damaged. Yeah, he was the sweetest groundhog though. Did he see his shadow too many times and it scared him or?

I guess so. So if you've ever watched the North Carolina groundhog day, that's

Sir Walter Wally, that's the groundhog I'm talking about. Oh, really? Yep, he passed away so he's not doing it anymore, but for the past like seven years, it was that groundhog.

He got hit by a car and yeah. That's too bad.

Well, we're up against our time. So I think you're done with the animals you were gonna show us, is that right?

Yes. Okay, Jeff wanted to show his crabs. Do you wanna see his crabs,

Michael? Yeah. Jeff, are your crabs ready to go on? Well, let me ask them.

I fished them out of their home grown aquarium.

He's allergic to crabs. No. Hold it back just a little bit,

Jeff, so we can see it better. Oh, he's cute.

Jeff, hold it back and then also talk because - They're very easy to take care of.

The one, I got into this because some friends of mine went to Tahiti and a person that was out there collected some seashells for me and she doesn't collect shells for herself, but she brought me back a seashell.

And when she put it on her kitchen table, it started moving. And we realized there was a live hermit crab in there.

And it was a surprise to her, especially because it had been locked up in her luggage in a plastic bag for three days.

No air, no food, no water, no light, and yet it survived.

And I brought it home and I scoured the internet to find out how I could save this thing and realized they need salt water and fresh water.

And I put a tag together for them. The second one I bought as a companion because they don't like to be lonely even though they're hermit crabs, but they're a little shy and they also get irritated.

I dropped one once and it fell on the floor and then it really pinched me hard when

I went to pick it up. But this one's hiding way inside.

This one is from Cuba and his name is Hurricane.

And the one from, I don't know if you can see it in there. You can see one claw. Yeah, we see it.

And the other one is Typhoon. And he's holding on to the shell.

Whoops, now he let go. And that was the end of the hermit crab.

But they're easy to take care of. They're scavengers, so they'll eat just about anything.

Let's see if I can get him up to the... Yeah, I can feel his feet. Can you see?

I've got to go this way. Back up just a little bit. There you go. Yeah, he's looking for something to hold on to now.

And he's trying to pinch me. Okay. But they're very cute.

The hermit crab from Tahiti was snow white when I first got it.

And I put it in this bowl with some sand and a couple of pieces of shell and things from Tahiti.

And I put a little plastic lid in there with some fresh water. It immediately found the water and drank it all up.

So it was very thirsty. And then when

I set up the terrarium for it, they like sand that's deep enough for them to crawl into and they'll bury themselves and they'll molt.

Well, within three days of my putting it in there, it vanished for like a week.

And when it came out, it was much larger and it had some beige colored spots on it.

So it molted within three days of my getting it. So that was a surprise. The other one to my knowledge has not molted yet, but supposedly they molt every six months or so.

Well, when I come there in February, I will be waiting in anticipation to see them, but we need to finish up with Michael and we appreciate you sharing your crabs.

So Michael, before we go off, we'd like to, I guess that we didn't get a proper introduction.

So we want to make sure that you tell people how they can find you. Bob is also asking if you could briefly tell us how you got started in your ministry.

And then again, yeah, we want people to be able to find you and see your work and maybe if they could donate and be a partner.

Okay, well, thank you. So I was an acrobat in Las Vegas.

When I graduated high school, I decided to join the circus instead of go to college. And then when

I left that, I was trying to figure out what my other passion was and I've always loved animals.

And so I was like, I wonder if I could work with animals. And then I started working and got into the creation science aspect of animals.

And I started looking at stuff in a different way. And I was like, this stuff is, it's designed.

It's so cool when you get to see how incredible all these animals are. Like, it just doesn't make sense that it happened.

Like when you look at a plane, you're not like, oh, it looks like that just happened. No, like someone's smart, figured it out and put it together.

And that's what I see when I see these animals. And so I started teaching.

I got involved with some rescues, started working to get some experience. And then I ended up taking over one of the rescues exotic department.

And that's kind of how the Genesis Animal Sanctuary started. And then we just started doing more education, going to schools and churches and doing talks.

And that's kind of how we got started. On our website, it's genesisanimalsanctuary .org.

And you can check out what we do. Hopefully we'll be doing some stuff with the Wonder Center and David Reeves Ministries soon.

We're trying to get Bubbles down there. We're going to hopefully at some point, raise some money and do a big display down there.

And Bubbles is going to move down to the Wonder Center, hopefully here in the next year, which is really exciting.

And then, yeah, I think that's... Maybe you can do a Christian alternative to, what is that?

GoFundMe to raise money for Bubbles. It could be like support Bubbles. Yeah. So we're excited to get him down there.

It's going to be really cool. They have some cool stuff down there and we're going to hopefully be able to add a little bit to it.

And Michael, pronounce your name for everybody. Michael. It's Mahan. It's M -A -H -A -N.

I guess it's on the thing, but. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you for joining us tonight. It's been very interesting.

And we're Creation Fellowship Santee. And you can find links to most of our past videos by typing in tinyurl .com

forward slash C -F -Santee. That's C like creation, F like fellowship.

And the word Santee is spelled S -A -N -T -E -E. You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

So you get on our mailing list. We won't spam you, but you will get invitations to our upcoming speakers.

And speaking of that, we'll be off next week, February 2nd. And the week after February 9th, we'll have our friend,

Dr. Jason Lyle, will be back and he'll be talking to us about some of the newest findings from the

James Webb Space Telescope. So it's one that you won't want to miss. It'll be very interesting.

So with that, thank you. Thank you again, Michael, for joining us tonight. You're very welcome.

Can I add one more thing? Yeah. In Matthew, it says, are not two sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your father's care.

Even the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid you are worth more than many sparrows.

When you look at creation, it's so cool. He thought of everything. And then he designed us in his image and that's incredible to think about.

Yeah, praise the Lord. That is one of my favorite verses. And usually our speaker, I didn't spring this on you until now, prays us to close us.

Are you interested in that? Do we want to go offline first and thank him?

Okay, yeah. Yeah, we'll do that. Okay, I will stop the stream and Joyce, you can stop recording.