You know who else had questions about fish on the Ark?
Hitler.
Well, there are approximately 32,000 identified fish species in the world, approximately 40% freshwater and 60% saltwater.
Let’s assume that the saltwater fishes did not have to worry about being on the ark; they could just hang out in the salt water and wait for things to get back to normal. Let’s further assume that 9/10 of the remaining fresh water species could survive OK without the ark. That leaves:
32,000 X 0.4 X 0.1 = 1280 fish species that would have needed room on the ark.
That’s a lot of fishtanks!
Or perhaps Noah was able to accommodate all of the fish (and land animals!) buy using some kind of trans-dimensional space portal. Or a miracle. Something like that. So we’ll have to assume that he was able to store all of the animals using some kind of magic.
The interesting thing comes when Noah and family have to get all of the fish back to where they come from. Fish species in the world are not just randomly scattered. It’s actually pretty interesting where they are found. For example, the massive variety of African Cichlid species from Lakes Malawi, Victoria, and Tanganyika. (around 2000 species!) Each one of these would have needed to have been placed into it’s very specific habitat in a specific area.
Or it would be interesting to figure out just how Noah managed to get the each of the many different species of three-spined stickleback fish into it’s appropriate lake or stream habitat. He would have had to go from lake to lake and put the correct fish in each place. Quite a job!
Or maybe he had access to a teleporter and the correct coordinates, so he could just beam each fish (and land animal) to it’s correct habitat and location on the globe. Or it was another miracle.
Maybe he launched the fish with fucking magnets!
Stop sending people to the wrong books. That should have been Ichthyology 3:15.
Yeah, but Episiotomy sounds like it could be a book of the Bible, if you didn’t know what it meant already. I’m gonna have to mix that in with my references to II Hezekiah.
But misleading people like that is a vanal sin (as is sodomy, I suppose), specifically proscribed against in Gullibilities 3:15.
Yes, but only on Fridays.
This thread is following so closely the wreck described in Toyuma 3:10.
why would there be fish in the ark? the flood could only kill air breathers and poor swimmers. Animals were placed in the ark to save them from extinction. A flood does not cause extinction, sure the fish left behind by the receding waters would die but not the entire species. there would be no need for saving the fish. they were never in danger.
I’ve got a better question. Why would there be an ark?
Forty days and nights of rain would flood a few rivers here and there, but it wouldn’t turn the earth into some Costnerian water-world.
Psst. Some fish need salt water. Other fish need fresh water.
Well remember, the people that wrote the bible were so ignorant that they thought the sky was a dome and over the dome there was water. God opened gates that allowed huge spigots of water to flood the Earth.
There is really no excuse for a modern person from a first world country believing this nonsense.
Fish on Fridays.
It figures.
So were the fountains of the earth fresh, salt or soda?
[QUOTE=strugglingChristian]
why would there be fish in the ark?
[/QUOTE]
Because otherwise all of the fish on earth, or at least a very high percentage of them would die. Sort of a drawback if you are wanting to keep the ecosystem going, wouldn’t you think?
Even leaving aside the saltwater/fresh water aspect, think about dumping billions or even trillions of tons of mud into the oceans and what effect that might have on the sea life. As an experiment take a large wheel barrow full of dirt and dump it into an aquarium and see what happens. Then, to further experiment, clear out all of the now dead fish and take your tank full of fresh water fish and dump in a bunch of salt water, and vice versa and see what happens. After you clean out all of the next batch of dead fish, do both together…and you will still not be doing all of the things that would happen in a world wide flood as described in the bible. You also have issues with low oxygen (more like no oxygen levels in the water after something like that), with no photosynthesis during whatever event would have been able to bring up the water levels as described and about a dozen (or more) other factors that would have killed off everything, including the fish.
I guess people just think that water is water as far as fish and other sea/lake life goes. Sadly, reality is a bit more complex.
A world wide flood as described in the bible would most certainly be an extinction event for the majority of aquatic species. My guess is the only thing left would be organisms at the very deepest levels of the ocean that use hydrothermal vents and the like for energy and sustenance, and even there I’m unsure how they would do with the levels of sentiments being dumped into the oceans from a world wide event. Possibly the only thing that would survive is some types of bacteria, if that.
You really have no idea about what such an event would cause, do you? And, ironically enough, neither did the folks who wrote that story and made it a world wide event. They had no idea how big the world actually was, or what such a flood would entail. But they had an excuse that you don’t…they didn’t know any of these things, nor did they have any way of finding out at the time…you do. Yet you remain ignorant anyway.
-XT
The legendary Fountain of Youth was actually a Fountain of Sprite. It was thought to give youth because those who drank it became hepped up on sugar like children and they ran amok playing Tag.
Talk about a Sophie’s Choice…
I think this is an excellent point, and it brings up a second question: Are mermaids fish? We know from historical records and the work of Professor Jones that the Ark of the Covenant contained mermaids. Flying, face melting mermaids. But are they fish?
How did the specific fish species get back to the very specific geographic locations and habitats that they were able to survive in?
You’d think that there would have been a very general “mixing up” of fish species as they all were in a large body of water that then gradually receded, leaving a few of them in the lakes and rivers remaining after all the water went away. The different fish species should have been more or less randomly distributed.
Yet this is not the case when we look at the geographic distribution that we see today. What we see, rather, is a situation that looks remarkably like the fish evolved and new species occured according to evolutionary theory.
I guess the alternate explanation is the Ark theory of fish distribution, also known as “God did it”.
In Biblical times, people lived to be hundreds of years old and raindrops were much, much bigger.