37,000 Species Of Fish And 400,000 Species Of Beetles!

We all need to accept and value one another, in all of our glorious variety, and not try to fit people into a mold or expect them to be just like us. Because it is an undeniable fact that God loves variety. Consider the natural world, for example. In this world that God designed and created, scientists have identified over 37,000 distinct species of fish. That figure comes from “Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes”, which is named for a man who spent 40 years as curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences, Bill Eschmeyer. During his lifetime, Bill visited every museum in the world that held a specimen of a new species of fish, museums on six continents and over 100 countries. 37,000 species. And there are many more yet to be discovered. Over 400 were added just in 2025. If you were start naming each species of fish using their scientific names, at the rate of one per second: “Abalistes filamentosus (that’s the hairpin triggerfish); Abalistes stellatus (that’s, of course, the flat-tailed triggerfish); Acanthurus achilles (the Achilles surgeonfish), and so on, it would take you ten hours just to read through the list. Now, if you asked me how many different kinds of fish you need when creating a new world from scratch, I might have said three or four hundred. But God made 37,000. Why? Because he loves variety.

The British biologist, John Haldane, was once asked what he concluded about the Creator from his lifelong study of animal life. His response was that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles”. Why? Because there are over 400,000 different species of that particular type of insect in the world. And those are just the ones we have discovered and named. Scientists say there could be a million more beetle species yet to be discovered.

And the God who created over 37,000 species of fish and more than 400,000 species of beetles is the same God who created each of the 8 billion people in the world, and who created each of them to be unique. Because God loves variety, and differences, and uniqueness. And that includes each one of us here today. One of the things God loves about you is that you are different from every other person on the planet. That’s the way he made you, because he loves that variety. And we need to value that in one another, just as God does.