Supporting life aboard the ark

It seems to me that a great many animal species would not be able to survive a prolonged stay in the ark unless very special arrangements were made to accomodate them; one example I would like to discuss is Chalcid Wasps.Many species of Chalcid wasps have a symbiotic relationship with a single species of fig tree; the breeding and larval stages taking place inside the fruit and often providing a service of pollination for the plant.
They need living, developing fruit in which to complete their life cycle. Some of these fig species are large trees before they come into bearing.How could the Chalcid wasps have survived the flood?[This message has been edited by Mangetout, 05-02-2003]{Fixed formating by swapping positions of bracketed b and bracketed i (UBB code) - Adminnemooseus}[This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-06-2003]

OK, and why didn't my formatting work?

Sheesh, is it just me or does this 'kind' thing get a bit bbroader every time I blink?How long before kind==phylum?

Sure, it is also true that the taunt "haha!, speciation is one thing, but show me the evolution of a new genus!" is a tall order because the taxonomy that exists below the level of species/subspecies/varieties (that is changing now, albeit slowly), is legacy.Expecting a cat to evolve into a dog is like expecting Apple to start producing Wintel PCs - somewhere back in the mists of time, there was a point where there was no Apple, Intel and Microsoft; they all branched off from common roots, but they are stuck with the legacies of those branch events.Anyway, we're getting off topic. Are there any literalists here?

Sure, but aren't those 'new' in the sense of them just being new discoveries, rather than 'new' in the sense of them having arisen as a result of branching off from something else while we're watching.Like that organism froma 'new' phylum (the one that lives on lobster mouthparts) - it isn't really new, we just took a long time to notice it.

Indeed; had there been human observers at the time when the split between chordates and [whatever else there was], they would almost certainly have classified the new organism Somethingia Chordata - i.e. they would have viewed it as a speciation event, even though it looks from here like a branch at phylum level.

But if there were floating vegetation mats of such size that they were able to sustain entire ecosystems (including large mature fruitiing trees) for the duration of the flood, these would be quite suitable for occupation by humans.Furthermore, if the floating mats were able to remain intact through conditions at the onset of the flood, there seems to be no good reason why humans also wouldn't survive, clinging to large pieces of floating debris (until they could get to one of these floating island ecosystems).Really, I think the floating mat hypothesis has no merit whatever; the vast majority of trees cannot tolerate waterlogging at the roots.(edited for typos)[This message has been edited by Mangetout, 05-06-2003]

What did all of that mean, anybody?

Ah, I wondered if it might be something like that; I've seen it a few times on other boards; the posts have just enough semblance of meaning to make people try really hard to penetrate them; requests for clarification are met with equally wordy and meaningless replies; frustration and other hijinks ensue.

Hi Brad, thanks for your response, but calculating implementation through an encrypted construct on the structured signature together with your pipeline of programmed frequency incompletely filters a memory of static transparency, can you tell me whether you plan to begin from a conceptual framework in a static manifestation by predictive stasis, surrendering my consent of distilled selection, or by enabling location from a distilled calculation with simulated tools, abstracting your collective terms of an irreversable construct?

That was the output of a computer program I wrote a while back; it accurately mimics the style(and content) of an incoherent message board correspondent I was dealing with at the time.

Fair enough. It is time to stop siphoning recursion from the programmed stages in the distilled contract by extracting the resource of abstracted purpose of logical abuse.Let us resume the methodical production of a systematic commodity of structured method implementation with internal resolution of the conceptual framework of cognitive communication, applying to every concept of cognitive rationale.

Ahhh, understanding dawns... I had been reading the forum as "[geology] and [the great flood]", rather than geology in relation to the great flood...