How much damage did those two termites do to Noah's Ark?
Did the termites, or any other insects, breed while on Noah's Ark?
Did the termites, or any other insects, breed while on Noah's Ark?
Anonymous
Favorite Answer
Enough damage to make it so no evidence of the Ark could be found.
Liz
Okay.. So. Termites...
Have WAY more than your standard two sexes.
Lesse..We got:
Workers: Blind, needed to keep the food cycle moving. Maybe 500 of em.
Soldiers: We can probably skip solders, since god is watching out for us for the next 40 days. Also we can Skip Alates and therefor de-alates, they won't be needed until the whole Ararat thing goes down.
So for reproductives we need
Queen
King
a few Neotenics to move the eggs around and monitor the Queen's pheromone levels.
So given that Noah had his entomology together and managed to get a functioning termite colony on board. You got 1000 eggs a day, 40 days. Call it an average of 15 thousand termites working the whole run...
A normal colony (about 60k individuals) will eat only about a fifth of an ounce of wood in a day. So doing the math, the whole termite colony will actually only consume about 2 ounces of wood over the whole trip. So what is that? A little nick in the floorboards.. BUT. We got 2600 (give or take) known species of termite.. Sooo.
Actually.. interestingly This one does work out. You could keep a minimal reproductive colony of all the known species of termites in the world going on a boat for 40 days... Cost you about 300 pounds of wood chips... Weird. You COULD actually do it. Huh.. wadatyaknow...
Oh.. Whoops. 7 months on the boat.. Okay... You need 3 and a half tons of wood to do the whole termite thing.. Yeah.. That's a pretty nasty ding in the woodwork.
conundrum_dragon
I am more worried about how they breathed since the flood apparently covered the tallest Mt. Do you know how high that is? The air is thinner and colder up there. But I suppose they had branches and such to feed them. If I had to take a wild guess. I won't even go into a boat not even half the size of the Titanic holding all those animals.
M
And God looked upon the waters and the arc was not found. Then God saw 2 termites on a sliver of wood floating and asked if they have seen the arc. The termites turned their eyes to heaven and exclaimed " I can't believe we ate the whole thing."
Anonymous
Irrelevant compared to damage the ark caused itself by falling apart since it would have to be too big to stay stable and not break apart. But since this is just a fairy tale it doesn't matter anyway. I can't believe we have high school graduates that take this story seriously.