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The American alligator has some 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 a tail to a predator, escape and then push back a new one later. It’s not just lizards that can perform this biological magic trick. Juvenile alligators appear to have the ability to partially repel 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 a mystery. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports this month answers a few questions about what’s going on there and confirms that young alligators have a remarkable capacity for regeneration.
Researchers from LDWF and Arizona State University (ASU) “have found that young alligators have the ability to grow back their tails up to three-quarters of a foot, or 18% of their total body length,” according to one ASU press release Monday.
A combination of imaging and anatomical studies gave us insight into what goes on in the tails.
This infographic shows how the regrown tail differs from the original. A tube of cartilage (in yellow) replaces the missing bone.
Arizona State University
“What makes the alligator interesting, apart from its size, is that the regrown tail shows signs of regeneration and wound healing in the same structure,” said lead author Cindy Xu, who is now postdoctoral fellow studying tendon regeneration at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Xu said the team were surprised to find scar-like connective tissue rather than muscle in the pushed back tails. She tweeted a look at one of the cocks in question, which is quite different from an original tail.
The history of alligator tails leads to questions that delve deep into history, to the ancestors of dinosaurs to birds and alligators. “Our discovery that alligators have retained the cellular machinery to regrow complex tails while birds have lost this ability raises the question of when in evolution this ability was lost,” said the co-author. Kenro Kusumi from ASU.
It is not just the distant past to which this study relates. Understanding how alligators regenerate their tails could have implications for the medical field. Said ASU, “The researchers hope their findings will help lead to discoveries of new therapeutic approaches to repair injuries and treat diseases such as arthritis.”
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