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A white-headed dwarf gecko with tail lost due to autotomy. Autotomy (from the Greek auto-, "self-" and tome, "severing", αὐτοτομία) or 'self-amputation', is the behaviour whereby an animal sheds or discards an appendage, [1] usually as a self-defense mechanism to elude a predator's grasp or to distract the predator and thereby allow escape.
Anole tails often have the ability to break off at special segments, which is known as autotomy. The tail continues to wriggle for a period after detaching, attracting the attention of the predator and commonly allowing the anole to escape. [62] The tail is regenerated, but it takes more than two months to complete this process.
The tail can be dropped (via caudal autotomy) to distract predators. The crested gecko does not regenerate its tail once lost. Most adults in the wild lack tails. [4] The toes and the tip of the semi-prehensile tail are covered in small hairs called setae. Each seta is divided into hundreds of smaller (approximately 200 nanometres in diameter ...
Eurydactylodes geckos have a long and slender tail [3] – being approximately the same length as their body [4] and possessing a snout-vent length of 100% [7] - and are round in cross section. [3] The tail is muscular [ 7 ] and prehensile, [ 3 ] aided by a subcaudal scansorial pad and adhesive subcaudal tissue with soft, long hairs. [ 2 ]
The vertebra (back bones) reach to the end of the tail and the rest is made up of muscles and connective fibers. It comes in very useful when the beaver is swimming.
As a defence against predators, they can autotomize (break off) their tails, and later grow a new replacement tail which gets longer each time they shed their skin. These new tails do not have the bony vertebrae of the original, and instead only have a rod of cartilage. This growth of cartilage does not have the ability to autotomise, so in ...
The lesser thorn-tailed gecko from Western Australia can shoot goo out of its tail. - Anders Zimmy/Natural History Museum
The interactions between the gecko's feet and the climbing surface are stronger than simple surface area effects. On its feet, the gecko has many microscopic hairs, or setae (singular seta), that increase the Van der Waals forces - the distance-dependent attraction between atoms or molecules - between its feet and the surface.