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The American alligator has a few tail regrowth secrets to share.
Ruth Elsey and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
Everyone knows the fascinating history of lizards, how they can lose their tails to a predator, run away and then regrow a new one later. It’s not just lizards who can perform this biological magic trick. Juvenile alligators appear to have the ability to partially regrow lost tails.
Biologists from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) spotted alligators in the wild that appeared to regrow missing tails, but the details remained mysterious. A study published in Scientific Reports this month answers some questions about what’s going on back there and confirms that young alligators have a remarkable ability to regenerate.
Researchers with LDWF and Arizona State University (ASU) “found that young alligators have the ability to regrow their tails up to three-quarters of a foot, or 18 percent of their total body length,” according to an ASU statement on Monday.
A combination of imaging and anatomical studies gave us a glimpse into what is happening in the queues.
This infographic shows how the regrown tail differs from the original. A cartilage tube (in yellow) replaces the missing bone.
Arizona State University
“What makes the alligator interesting, aside from its size, is that the regrown tail shows signs of regeneration and wound healing within the same structure,” said lead author Cindy Xu, who is now a postdoc. studying tendon regeneration at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Xu said the team was surprised to find scar-like connective tissue rather than muscle in regrown tails. She tweeted a look at one of the queues in question, which looks quite different from an original tail.
The tale of alligator tails leads to some questions that go deep into history, dating back to the dinosaur ancestors of birds and alligators. “Our finding that alligators retained the cellular mechanism for regrowing complex tails while birds lost that ability raises the question of when during evolution this ability was lost,” said co-author Kenro Kusumi of ASU.
It is not just the distant past that this study links to. Understanding how alligators regenerate their tails could have implications for the medical field. ASU said, “The researchers hope their findings will help lead to the discovery of new therapeutic approaches for injury repair and the treatment of diseases such as arthritis.”
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