This is just a short stop to share an AMAZING DESIGN FEATURE:

The agouti may not look like very much, but those of you who like Brazil nuts, including the country of Brazil, love this little mammal. And that's because without them there wouldn't be any Brazil nuts!

Brazil nuts are the only commercial nut found exclusively in Amazon forests. Sustainable harvesting of these nuts not only provides a livelihood for people, but also protects the forests from being cleared for agriculture.

Many tried to establish Brazil nut plantations in other parts of the world and have failed for a few reasons. Here's just a couple.

This first problem is getting the trees pollinated so they can even produce the seeds.
There’s only one insect for job, the orchid bee, which is big enough, strong enough, and has a long-enough tongue to pry the flower’s hood open and lap up the nectar within.

Second is that the Brazil nut seeds are so well protected that it seems that nothing could eat them. The tree produces capsules called “cocos”, which are thick, hard coconut-like pods that are as hard as cannonballs. This coco is so strong that even a fall of a couple of hundred feet doesn't crack them. Inside each of these seed capsules you'll find the individually armored Brazil nuts/seeds.

If the story stopped there, we wouldn’t have any Brazil nut trees! And that’s because the seeds would never escape the capsule to be planted so new trees could grow. So, God overcame that challenge with an animal called the agouti.

The agouti has two pairs of front teeth that are as sharp as chisels and they enable it to gnaw a hole into the seed capsule and get at the seeds.

That’s great, but there’s another problem. If the agouti ate all of the seeds, we still would get any new trees because the seeds would all be gone. But, God overcame that challenge by having the tree produce 15 or 20 nuts, which is far more than an individual agouti could eat in one sitting.

That’s great, but we still won’t get any more Brazil nut trees unless the seed gets planted. God overcame that problem by designing the agouti to bury the seeds that it can't eat immediately to save it for another time.

Fortunately, the agouti doesn't have is a perfect memory and will lose track of where it buried some of the seeds. This means that a significant amount of the nuts survive so they can become new trees!

This screams design by an amazing designer! Thank you Jesus.

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