The wonders of creation are all around us.

The amazing features found in different species of fish are just a sampling of the mysterious works of God’s creation.

Just as the stellar atmospheric heavens, the Oceans and its inhabitants present an unmistakable, evidence of the handiwork of God. Not only are myriads of fishes sustained there, but the greatest of all living creatures—the whale—is found there.

The Leaf fish, takes the colour of the surrounding foliage as a camouflage —they lie motionless on their side, almost invisible, until a fish strays into their view.  Then, in a split second with a sudden dart, they engulf their prey.

The Cuttlefish protects itself by shooting out black ink-like fluid called sepia to darken the water, enabling it to escape its enemies. According to Dr Jerry Bergman the cuttlefish screams design and negates evolution.

The Archer fish is one of the most famous living water creatures.  While most fish capture their prey while swimming, this innovative creature can also shoot a thin stream of water under pressure at insects as they fly in the air above the water!  Natural selection cannot account for their amazing ability. Nor can evolution account for the unique ability of this marvelous little fish!

Fish have specially constructed eyeballs enabling them to look almost instantly in any and all directions? They see behind, below, above and on the sides; Fish can see 30 percent farther than other visual instruments because God designed the eyeball of the fish to take into consideration the refraction of light.

In the waters of Malaya lives a fish with bifocal lenses built right in its eyes. This little sardine-sized fish is prized for food by the seagulls. So the little fish has to watch carefully for approaching danger; hence it must have good far vision, but since it feeds on the microscopic larvae that abound in the water, it must also acquire very good near vision as well. And so the Creator provided a little membrane that comes halfway up on its eyes, giving it bifocal vision!

The salmon is an anadromous fish; that is, it  spends years at sea, then comes back to its own river, and, what is more, it travels up the side of the river into which flows the tributary in which it was born. If a salmon going up a river is transferred to another tributary it will at once realize it is not in the right tributary and will fight its way down to the main stream and then turn up against the current to fulfill its destiny.

A reverse problem to solve is the case of the eel: A catadromous fish that spend most of their lives in fresh water but migrate to salt water to breed.  These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all the ponds and rivers everywhere, across thousands of miles of ocean, to the abysmal deeps south of Bermuda: There they breed and die. The little ones will immediately start back and find their way to the shore from which their parents came and thence to every river, lake and little pond. They can now grow and when they are mature, they will, by some mysterious law, go back through it all to complete the cycle. Interestingly, nature has also delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its much greater journey.

The lobster, having lost a claw, will by a mysterious process grow it back. When restoration is complete, the cells stop work’. A fresh-water polyp , if divided into halves can reform itself out of one of these halves. Likewise, angle worm will grow another head if its head is cut off.

Describing the wonderful nature of fish in the Ocean, James Harvey wrote: “They are clothed and accoutered in exact conformity to their clime. They are clad, or rather sheathed, in scales, which adhere closely to their bodies, and are always laid in a kind of natural oil—which apparel nothing can be more light, and at the same time so solid, and nothing so smooth. It hinders the fluid from penetrating their flesh; it prevents the cold from coagulating their blood, and enables them to make their way through the waters with the greatest possible facility. If in their rapid progress they strike against any hard substance, this scaly doublet breaks the force of it and secures them from harm”.

Still more remarkable is that wonderful apparatus or contrivance, “the air-bladder, with which they are furnished, for it enables them to increase or diminish their specific gravity, to sink like lead or float like a cork, to rise to whatever height or sink to whatever depths they please.” James Harvey

Is it merely an accident that fishes, that need them not, are devoid of ears which are found in all the animals and birds asks James Harvey?

A spiritually minded naturalist has pointed out that almost all flat fish, such as soles are white on their underside but tinctured with darkish brown on the upper, so that to their enemies they resemble the colour of mud and are therefore more easily concealed. What is still more remarkable, Providence, which has given to other fishes an eye on either side of the head, has placed both eyes on the same side in their species, which is exactly suited unto the peculiarity of their condition. Swimming as they do but little, and always with their white side downward, an eye on the lower part of their bodies would be of little benefit, whereas on the higher they have need of the quickest sight for their preservation.

Were fishes to reproduce like the most prolific of our terrestrial animals, a dozen only or a score, at each birth, the increase would be unspeakably too small for consumption: Seeing as it were that they are food for their kit and kin of the deep. Therefore, to supply millions of assassins with their prey and millions of our own tables with food, yet not to depopulate the watery realms, the issue produced by every breeder is almost incredible. They spawn not by scores or hundreds, but by thousands and tens of thousands.

Mute though the fishes are, yet they are full of instruction for the thoughtful inquirer: Allahu Akbar!

Barka Jumuah and happy weekend