What Happened to Fish in the Flood?
Yesterday a church friend asked me this fascinating question about the Genesis flood:
Pastor, what happened to the fish and sea creatures in the Great Flood? Since everything was destroyed, how did fish survive?
We know that Noah didn't carry fish and sea creatures onto the ark. After all, doing this would be unnecessary because fish live in water (Gen 1:20-22) and water would cover the Earth throughout the Flood. Furthermore, the Bible doesn't mention fish and sea creatures when it describes the animals going into the ark (Gen 7:2-3, 8-9) and the animals which the Flood would destroy (Gen 6:7).
Even so, some important questions remain:
- First, how did both freshwater and saltwater fish survive? Many fish require special conditions to survive (such as salt water or fresh water, or a specific range of water temperatures)?
- Second, how did fish survive the cataclysmic, unstable conditions which transpired during the Flood as fountains spewed out hot water from below the Earth's crust (Gen 7:11) and water poured down from the sky (Gen 7:11), causing turbulence and currents of unprecedented force and proportions?
To answer these questions, I will make several observations:
- Though some fish survived the Flood, most of them perished instead. In fact, ninety-five percent of the fossil record consists of marine life. These fish and sea creatures would have died due to factors such as sudden changes in water habitat conditions, overpowering turbulence, and massive flows of sediment.
- We are not able to confidently identify either the species of fish or the salt levels of water which existed prior to the Flood. Factors like these have changed over time. Fish prior to the Flood may have been more highly adaptable to changes in water conditions than fish alive today would be, enabling those who survived to adapt to the changes caused by the Flood.
- It's possible that some fish survived as embryos in the water, encased by the protective outer walls of their eggs. These unborn fish may have endured the Flood, then hatched and grown into full-grown fish after the Flood subsided.
Though we cannot answer the question conclusively of how fish survived the Flood, we know that they did survive and we know that reasonable answers exist to
