Seahorses – Designed or Evolved?

One of the most fascinating creatures in the ocean is the seahorse.

With their distinctive horse-shaped head, S-curved bodies, coiled tails, and variety of colors they almost look like some kind of mythological creature.

Did you know that it is the male seahorse that gives live birth to their young?  The males have a pouch on their abdomen where they carry the fertilized eggs until they hatch.

While most seahorses are fairly plain in appearance like the one shown above, others have elaborate growths all over their bodies that help to camouflage them from predators and potential prey.  Some of them, such as the leafy sea dragon have so much camouflage that they are very difficult to distinguish from some of the sea grasses and sea weed that grows in the waters where they live.

Most seahorses will use their coiled tails to wrap around a branch or something to hold them in place as they wait for smaller creatures to swim by.  Then with lightning speed, they strike out and suck in the unsuspecting critter.  They feed mostly on small crustaceans, but will eat anything that they can fit through their narrow snouts.

Evolutionists believe that seahorses evolved from pipefish because of the similarity in the shape of the head and snout and that some pipefish look like straightened seahorses.   

Now, one evolutionist, Sam Van Wassenbergh of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, believes that he has discovered why the seahorses evolved their S shaped curves and horse-like heads.  Wassenbergh used high-speed filming along with mathematical models to help him determine that seahorses can strike at more distant prey than their pipefish ancestors do.

He observed that as seahorses sat and waited for small crustaceans to swim by would rotate their heads toward the prey and then using their curved necks were able to strike out at greater distances than the straight bodied pipefish.  Based upon his observations, Wassenbergh concluded that some ancestral pipefish evolved a more cryptic lifestyle.  As they developed the sit-and-wait behavior, it meant that they needed to be able to turn their heads and reach out further in order to capture their dinner.  In order to capture more prey, they became more S-shaped and evolved their horse-like heads until they evolved into seahorses that we see today.

Since pipefish and seahorses both still exist, wouldn’t one expect to see at least one or two transitional intermediates swimming around?

It always amazes me how often evolutionists attribute some sense of directive choice in the evolutionary process of plants and animals.  In the case of the seahorse, Wassenbergh believes that because the ancestral pipefish changed their behavior to a sit-and-wait hunting style that they realized they needed to change their physical shape to make this new hunting behavior more successful.  I wonder how many pipefish starved to death during the time it took them to evolve their new heads and body shape?

A more plausible explanation for the unique shape of seahorses is that they were designed that way from the beginning when God created all of the sea creatures on Day 5 of Creation.  Since then, seahorses, like most other creatures, have experienced a degree of speciation resulting in the numerous colors and unique body appendages we see today.

Reference

Why Are Seahorses Shaped Like That?, Red Orbit News, Jan. 26, 2011.