Autotomy: Nature's Dismemberment Plan

or early eleventh century. We don't know who wrote it, written by anonymous England's oldest work of epic literature. That. Yeah, if you've ever taken any kind of a course on Western literature, anything about that the English language, then you've probably come across Baowulf. And if you haven't, then you've probably seen any number of film adaptations ranging from well, I guess most him are pretty ridiculous because it's kind

of a ridiculous story. Like the basics here, it is that you have you have this Danish king roth Car. He has this hall where him and his buddies like to hang out to drink. They have to like to have a good time. But there's a monster that lives in the vicinity that does not like to listen to all of this crap, which is understandable. Yes, Grendel is the monster, and so Grendel comes and generally tears a bunch of people apart and then disappears into the night,

back to the moors. And uh. And then the next morning the king is very upset about this, so finally they bring in an expert. They bring in a monster's flayer in the form of the hero Beowulf. Beowulf is an outsider, He's Scandinavian. He's coming in and he waits up. The monster comes. Grendel comes and starts to attack. Beowulf wrestles with him, and in the in bo Wolf's pretty fearsome, and then he rips the arm off, and then Grendel

wales runs home and presumably dies. And I always, I always love the monster, so I was always disappointed by this. As a kid, I'm like, oh, come on, Grendel, like I really wanted more out of you in this chump just tears your arm off. I never liked Baowulf. I don't think he's a. He's a he's a likable character.

I was associated more with Grendel, so I recently was thinking, what if what if this was not a situation of my my hero grendel Um being bested, Like what if his anatomy, what if his evolved responses to a threat? What if they best at Beowulf? Of course, talking about automy here where most most of us see this at a very early age. When you catch a lizard, skink or something in your hand and what happens. The tail comes off, and children just fall apart in delight because

they're like, what, let's do it again? What I felt bad? I always felt bad, for sure, That's what I meant. That's what I meant. Don't Let's not do that again, is what the kids say. And then they go home and they make their beds. Autotomy is, of course, the self amputation of a body part or tissue as a means of self defense. There's no and there's no chewing involved here, there's no sign. Uh. It's more like an injection or or better yet, a shedding, and and we're

talking about tail autonomy. Uh. In the case of these lizards, which again is probably the example that is most most readily available to most people's brains, because because they drop them pretty easily, we'll get more into the lizards in the tail dropping because it is very fascinating territory. I just want to mention that I love that you have this Grendel revenge tail that you've recast it as autotomy, and uh, I'm starting to think about Grendel is the

Grinch of the village. Yeah right, that's that horrible noise coming from the village below, And I would love to see a Grinch tail with autotomy in it now. Yeah. Well, you know, imagine if the Grinch story had been the Grinch going down the who Ville and then the Who's beat him up and ripped his arm off. I would side with the Grinch every time. It's like he just wanted some piece of quiet, and you guys had to be jerks about it, and you're roast beast and you're

singing it's just nutty. Um. So yeah. The the regenerative powers here of some species was first discovered in seventeen forty when Abraham Trembling discovered that a polyp could regenerate its tentacle crowned head if it was amputated, and he called it hydra after of course the head renewing monster from Greek mythology. You cut off one head and to grow in its place. And of course that's the other fascinating thing about autotomy is that when the lizards has

its tail, a new tail grows back. And in my version of the Grendel story that's in my head alone, um, his arm would eventually grow back. It would not quite the same we'll get we'll get into that, but yet it would grow back. We see starfish doing this. By the way, some flat warrens can rebuild their entire bodies from a single cell, which is fascinating. And I wanted to mention gecks that dropped their tails. Um. They found that it shows the tail actually shows a complex pattern

of repeating move mints to distract the attacker. So we're talking for up to fifty seconds dramatic flips or lunges by this tailty seconds fifty seconds, and the gecko tail that has been self amputated makes four to eight rhythmic moves per second with one of these complex movements like flipping. Because the classic scenario here outside of children picking them up, is that the lizard is threatened by a predator, say a house cat or a snake or something, and it

jettison's the tail. Tail just falls off and this and the and the the lizard makes a run for it. But you know, you don't only just want to leave the gift of the tail. You also wanted to twitch. You want it to move around as a distraction, because again, anything you can do to survive, anything that this mechanism can do to push the game in favor of the lizard of the prey. Yeah, it's kind of the MacGuffin of the plot here. So you just leave this tail.

You don't want it to look dead. You want it to look alive, and you want it to look like it's, you know, something that the cat or the child in this case I suppose still wants to play with. And that's why I think it's so interesting about the fact that they are these central pattern generators in the tail itself after it has ejected itself from the lizard that allow it to to sort of regenerate itself and in some cases to the coloration of the tail is different,

like Skilton. Skink is a great example because it's tails also bright blue, so if it needs to jettison this tail. Bam, it's it's not only is it is it twitching and hopping all over the place for for for a little bit. It's also a bright color. It's a nice like look

here not here moves. All right, Hey, well we're gonna take a quick break and we come back more on autotomy, More on the lizards dropping their tail, and another reason that lizards and and other organisms will get into will drop a limb or a tail or some of the part of their body and make a break for it. All right, we're back out. Another reason that it appears that lizards, or at least some lizards do a little

bit of the tail dropping a little. The autotomy comes down to not a general population of predators, but a single predator, because that's kind of been one of the the the existing theories about how this works with the tail dropping. So they've evolved it because they live in a situation where there are a lot of predators around. So therefore they have to have a pretty drastic means of getting away. And you'll see environments where the the

lizards have more predators to deal with. The predator population is greater, and so therefore their propensity for autotomy is increased. Okay, so more roving children in cats, the more there are tail droppers, yeah, at the drop it at the drop of a hat, right, especially that hat is being wielded

by a toddler. Now we're looking at a two thousand and nine study from the University of Michigan, and they were looking at, uh, particularly some lizards on some offshore A, G and C islands, and they found that the situation here with the autonomy is that the lizard is dealing with one particular superprector in the form of venomous vipers. All Right, the vipers are just eating lizards left and right.

This is the main concern for these for these creatures, and they're they're finding that what happens is that if the viper bites the lizard on the tail, they jettison the tail. It's like on an episode of Walking Dead, if an individual's bit on the foot by a zombie, what do you do. You grab a hack saw and you you saw off that limb to keep the zombie illness from taking hold of the individual. Okay, So in

this case, they're just getting rid of the tail. So the venom doesn't get into their bloodstream and spread throughout the rest of their bodies. Yeah, they gotta cut and run. They gotta cut their losses, and their losses in this case are the tail. So the thing about this tail dropping is that it is an engineering marvel. You know, and you have always known about this right as a child, you knew that that the lizards tail would drop off, but you probably never occurred to you like, exactly how

does this happen? And if you look at this closely, it is jaw dropping. Yeah, because the basic story that probably a parent or teacher told you when you said, oh, my goodness, that lizards tail came off, and they were like, oh, it's all right, it does that as a self defense to the measure, the tail will grow back and then it can drop that tail again if it's threatened. Okay, that that's that's an acceptable story. But then when you

start asking why how does that work? Like like in any human, in a even a monster like Grendel, like to imagine that happening, that like an arm coming off and then not bleeding to death and then growing back even a even a partial arm in its place, like

that just seems crazy. That seems magical, right, How does that affect the organism And we'll get more into that, But in terms of the actual engineering of it, it it turns out that there are horizontal fracture planes and most lizards, not all, and lizard tales will actually detach on what we could call it is like a biological dotted line. And Jan angled in colleagues from our university in Denmark.

They used advanced bio imaging techniques to discover that the tokay gecko shuts its tail along these preformed score lines in specific regions of the tail, and then this is all held together by adhesive forces at these lines, and the process of separation is independent of protein cleaving enzymes. There's a lot going on here, and there's micro structures at the ends of muscle fibers that are probably involved

in the release of the tail. But what's even cooler is that that the lizard actually assists in this um cleaving of the tail by contracting muscles around the fracture planes. And we know this because we've had experiments where we've put the lizards under and we found that it's harder to get the tail off of an unconscious lizard. Yeah, right, meaning that obviously when they're conscious, they are they're aiding this effort. So it's still you know, there's still score lines.

The tail is still detachable, but they have to actually have some sort of conscious wheel, some sort of reaction to actually push it off and the way that it is pushed off and in this sort of fracture line, these prescord lines. It makes uh, it makes the blood loss minimal and actually helps in terms of the healing process. And there is a book called Engineered Biomimicry. In that book they're actually saying that the principles of autotomy could

be used in a bunch of places. Um, they were talking about fire protection and buildings, flow control for sewer systems, and disassembly of industrial products. So if you have a car that you need to disassemble or a washing machine, you would have fracture points for disassembly. And it's really sort of brilliant when you think about it in manufacturing.

So you can think of it in terms of like what happens if the name to the individual like loses a limb out in the wild, Like what are some of the first aid things you're supposed to do, Like you want to you want to close the wound, you want to apply a tourniquet. I would say, I rip off a piece of my shirt exactly, right, and so then I'm like, I'm gonna have like a half shirt on at this point, and I've got like a six pack, and I'm rambo exactly and then I used that as

a tourniquet. Yeah, So similar things happen the ring of muscles around the score lines. They essentially tie off local blood vessels to prevent bleeding. And immediately after the autonomy occurs, the skin contracts around the edge of the tail step. So it's like applying a tourniquet in the bandage. Yeah, I mean, very cool stuff. And again, this is engineering at work here, and that is why some people are

very interested in in in bio mimicking it. Yes, now there's a cost, of course, of course, losing a limb is just no small thing, right, because they're going to grow the tail back or a tail back, but it's not gonna be there immediately. So you have this wonderful trick to have ad a predator, but you can only do it a few times during the course of your life because it's gonna take take quite a while for it too to grow back. We're talking months or even longer. Well.

And also think about the structure of your own body. And imagine if you had a tail and you had a lot of fat stored in it, if you lost it, that would be a huge source that you had lost, right, and a food source, of potential food source for your body. And not only that, your locomotion would differ because all of a sudden, your weight is distributed differently, right. I mean, when a lizard runs, the tail is very much a

factor in its movements. So you take the tail away, you're gonna it's gonna it's gonna affect movement, no doubt. And again to your point, you lose the fat stores in the tail, and then you have to so you're losing the energy you had stored away, and then you've got to use more energy to grow the tail back. Ah. Yeah, and this is really interesting. Um. This is from the Journal of Zoology. The title of this study, by the way I love it, is to cut a long tail short.

A review of a lizard caudal autotommy studies carried out over the last twenty years by Bateman and Fleming says that a study of four populations of and metallicust we're talking about the metallic skink lizard, demonstrated that the population with the greatest number of tail breaks was also smaller, which could be an indirect reflection of the energetic burden of repeated caudal autonomy a caudle meaning the tail falling off and tail regeneration in this population. It ends up

having effect on their their reproductive abilities. It can affect an individual's ability to socialize and or mate with other lizards because yeah, you survive, but you no longer have a tail, at least for the time being. Yeah, I think about poor Grendel going back to his layer, and maybe there are other Grendel like uh ladies, maybe they're not going to be so interested to invest their time in Grendel because I don't know. First of all, he's gonna be able to regenerate that limb, and he doesn't

have a lot of time also to spend with them. Well, that's why he ended up living with his mom. That's how it happens always. But yeah, I mean, he's got to take that time in the energy to try to heal himself. And we also see that in females um and female lizards who have lost their tails that they actually produce um less in terms of their clutches of eggs. And presumably again this is because they're devoting more of their energy to regenerating that tail. And also you see

reduction just in reproductive fitness in general. So, as we've said, the tail grows back, but what grows back is not going to be a perfect replication of what was lost. It's more like it's not a full size spare. In other words, it's kind of like that little donut tire that you keep in the back. You can you can put it on, Yes, now that you can actually drive down the road, but you're not going to achieve the

same speed you did before. The car is gonna look a little funny, and people are going to if you take it on the interstate, people are gonna like point out their window at you and say, hey, why aren't you driving with that spare? Yeah, eventually it might wear down, right, slow you down. So let's let's look at Grendel here in his lair, right, He's got the tourniquet on there,

he's trying to stem the blood flow. And um, you know, if Grendel had been a lizard, perhaps muscular rings would be helping to tie off really instead of that tourniquet. But what happens immediately after autonomy is that the skin contracts around the end of the tail stuff. So you have cells from the outer most layer of skin closing over the wound and you have new cells creating what is called a wound epidermis, and this sends chemical instructions

to the other cells. And this is key. Mature cells like muscle and connective tissue cells revert to an immature mass called a blastema, and this is the thing that helps to to actually create the regeneration of that limb that was lost. And we'll talk more about that blastoma later when we talk about humans and the possibility of

regeneration of our own limbs. Um. But you know, you have different species with different growth rates, and then this is a slow thing happening, and as you say, you don't always get the same sort of limb that you have before. It's a little bit more like a spirit tire. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take another quick break and when we come back more on this fascinating topic more tails dropping and in some case that you're all right, we're back. We're

talking about autotomy. We're talking about shedding, jettison, dropping that pail or other part of the body in order to make a break for it. And it's the fascinating thing about this is not just lizards and amphibians that experienced this. We see it in a whole host of animals. It incurs in both vertebrates and invertebrates, and it is a measure that evolved separately in each. Right, this is kind of amazing that this is a self defense system that evolved.

And if you look at stone crabs, you will see that their claws they can you know, self eject and or weaving spiders. Now, we have talked about the orb weaving spiders before. We were talking about some of the things that they do doing during sexual reproduction. Sometimes, uh, the mail or spider will be decapitated for various reasons that I won't go into right now. But it also turns out that they can drop a leg if stung

by wasps. So there's like a lot of dismemberment going on. Yeah, and again it's kind of like the whole zombie thing, but by a zombie drop the leg stung by a beer wasp drop the leg because especially if you're spider, you've got you've got eight of those things, so you know if you can lose one, sure exactly. Um. And then you have something called Octo Patakias delatron squid or

o delatron. Yeah, it's nice, um. And this will actually deploy its limbs sometimes not only just to to scare a predator or to get them off of the trail of the squid itself, but also to wreak havoc on others. So they're sort of like independently, they can eject one of their limbs or many of them and they're just a freak. Yeah. Yeah, So that you know this limb is coming at you and it appears like it's attacking you.

And actually there's some great footage of this where you can see I think it's the boom Mic being attacked by one of the limbs. You know, that would really work in the human world. You know you're getting if you're getting hassled on the subway, just start throwing hands at them, this bloody stumped hands. Multiple. You're on Martha, our train system here in Atlanta, and you have one uh one part of your body that you can use

autonomy with what do you use? Well, I'm not going to drop the legs because I need this to run away. I'm probably going to go with maybe maybe my left forearm and hand, you know, just sort of can that way, can sort of sling it off at him with a punch on the end of it if need be. Wow, Okay, I think that makes sense. Originally I was thinking that I would just eject my nose into someone's eye. I don't know that would buy me much time. Yeah, Plus you'd have to have some other like you'd really have

to force that thing out. But I guess there's all there's air back there, the air cavities, nasal cavities. You could somehow some sort of propulsion system evolved there. Yeah, and you've never seen anoplew in my nose before. It's pretty impressive self defense sneeze. Yeah, that's why I try to do it in the bathroom. Uh not in the break room? All right? So what else though, when we look out into the emmal world, what else could amuse us? Well?

Of course, the most amazing creature really for for from our human perspective is of course when we can see this in mammals because it's one thing for a lizard to do it. It's one thing of course slugs do it. If you listen to our episode about slugs and love, and they're various reproductive measures, it should become no surprise when you learn about a slug doing anything gross. They

they're the the the inventors of everything disgusting. Sing their love darts, love darts, penises coming out of the sides of their heads, you name it. So yeah, like the the idea that they also practice autotomy not a surprise, but it is surprising when you start thinking about mammals doing it because you're a little closer to the human equation here, right, And we see this when we look at a particular road and called the African spiny mouse.

That's right, because al right, you human, you Robert, If you sustain a wounds your ear, what happens, well, then my ear's gonna look funny. It's like, I'm gonna get like I can bash in the ear enough times, I'm gonna get a call flower ear. If I lose a bit of it, I'm just gonna have a little less ear going on up there. You're gonna a scar tissue, yes, scar tissue is gonna build up. But if you are an African spiny mouse, it's an entirely different story here, Yeah,

the crazy part here. According to a two thousand twelve studies from the University of Florida, the African spiney mouse appears to regenerate ear tissue in a very similar way to a salaman or when it regrows a limb that has been lost to a predator. That means skin, hair, follicles, cartilage, everything in the ears will grow back. It also regrows a tissue on its main body when it's injured, but not as completely as it does with the ears, so it just heals quickly elsewhere in the body, but only

the ears truly regenerate. Now. Ashley W. Surfert Uh, the post doc researcher in this study punched holes in the ears of African spiney mice to figure this out. By the way, and he became with a whole punch. Uh. It doesn't say a whole. It doesn't say what the instrument was, but I would like to imagine that was the whole punch. But Cifert actually became interested in the mouse when a colleague said that it appeared to have or a waste skin that allowed it to escape a

predator's grasp. And that's once ip for said U. Let's take a closer look at this and see what's going on. Hair away skin. It's very like it's like an animal designed by Clive Barker that exists, right right, um, and the researchers actually believe that it could lead to a new model system for skin wound healing and tissue regeneration and humans. And that's the thing, right, And you see

this a lot. It's It's often what pops up at the very end of any study into autotomy is that the researcher will say, and hey, sometime in the future, this might help humans heal because it's a nice light. It's a nice way to end your study into lizards dropping their tails on some remote islands somewhere or in the backwoods of Georgia. We yeah, and we love that stuff. We love a little like naval gazing future gazing and uh. And if you can spin that out of a out

of a study, I'm all for it. And it also works great in the headline, right, lizards may hold the key to regional ration in humans in the future, or something to that effect. But right now, as humans, when when something happens to us, we're just talking about scar tissue and and that's pretty much that um. But getting the healing process to the point of actually creating a new limb would require that blastema that we were talking about,

that the muscles and the connected tissue cells. Reverting to an immature maths that is key. And that's where researchers are really looking into this and saying, you know, why don't mammals like us have this regenerative power? Well, why don't we have it? Though? The answer to that, of course is simple, it's why the same the same answer is why do we not have shells? Why do we not have uh, you know, crazy clause ripic banks apart?

Because we have evolved as a species depended more upon our brain power and ingenuity as opposed to any kind of built in weapons or defense measures that we have. Show we can point to our neo cortex and go, you don't have that, do you? Yeah, Like, the closest thing we have to this really as humans is the clip on tie you and go grab me by my neck tie and uh and and and brutalize me. No, because the tie comes right off, just like a lizards tay.

Hair extensions. Yeah, hair extensions another example. Oh you think you have me by the hair note, note comes right off. But what's standing in the way, what's standing in the way of us adapting this for humans, because certainly researchers are all already looking at the genetic basis for regeneration in the in lizards and then and then inevitably in African spinding lines as well, looking at what enables these limbs to regrow. And we know enough about gene tinkering

at this point. I mean, it's a fairly new ability, but we know enough about it to to realize, hey, it's at some point we can start combining a little A with all it a little from from column B and potentially have some sort of human ability for regeneration. What's standing in the way, besides the fact that you know it's scar tissue and boom and nothing else happens, is really trying to understand how that process works. And to do that, you've got to have the right sort

of species at your disposal. And in this case, the right sort of species is a salamander. And it takes a long time for that tail to regenerate, So it's not like you're collecting a massive data here. Yeah, it's slow to grow, and salamanders are not good laboratory animals. Also, salam energyenomes are really bloated. It turns out they have ten times the amount of DNA as humans, and no one's ever really syncus them all the way. And we

only recently developed the means to hack salamander genes. And we're talking recently. There's two thousand nine that we've really come into that. Uh and uh, you know another thing here about this is that not a lot of people are looking into it. It's not necessarily on everyone's radar because we have a few other stars in the classroom when it comes to uh, potential for enormous impact on

human health and repairing lost limbs, damaged organs, etcetera. Well, you're actually seeing strides and stem cell regeneration and particularly when you're talking about growing organs, So it would make sense that you would look more toward that column for hope of limb regeneration or limb growing. Really. Yeah, and also you have to consider the the the things we don't know about regeneration and these particular items were brought to our minds by ed Young, who wrote a BBC

article called will we ever regenerate Limbs? He pointed out the limb won't regenerate if the nerves inside don't start growing. But what exactly do the nerves do? He he asked, when the cells in the stump rewind their fates to become that blastema, how far back does it go? And then he pointed out how do the cells of the re growing limb know where they are? And how do they take the right shape or or how do they make a working limb and not just a useless, deformed,

you know limb on the end of the art. Yeah, that's pretty fascinating that so specifically it knows what to recreate the cells. So. Ed Young also said that perhaps the reason why humans don't have this um of our sleeves is that the same checkpoints this is equipped from him, the same checkpoints that stop ourselves from growing uncontrollably into tumors might also stop a blastema from forming. That kind of makes sense, right, You don't want any sort of

abnormal growth happening. So perhaps and humans it's just the stop gap measure to making sure that uh, something isn't becoming a malignant form. Yeah, And you don't want to like enable humans to regenerate just so that they can, uh, you know, every time I get the flu, I start growing random arms out of my back. That would be very helpful actually, but they'd be like little baby arms. What am I gonna do with those? Um? Just hold on the notes, game, right, certain to seem better? Right?

All right? So a career argument that Ciphert makes. Cypfer of the African spiny Mass says that human diseases from heart attacks to cirosis involves some sort of fibrosis where the body deals with injuries by laying down connective tissue. He says, fibrosis is the antithesis of regeneration. So if we can understand how animals avoided it could tell us how to stop scar tissue from building up on our

vital organs, which can be very problematic. So you're saying that this is still something that we should study, and we should still try to figure out how it happens and why it happens. Seaford also pointed out that small salamanders took four hundred days to grow back a leg and and and that's less than four millimeters across, and the largest ones needed more than a decade to finish the job. So Seaford argued that even if a human could grow a limb back with a with a with

a similar adaptive feature, it might take fifteen to twenty years. Now, if one loses a limb, that might be an acceptable wait time. That's the thing. I mean, it's not in terms of like treatment on an illness. Fifteen to twenty years, that's that's a long treatment time. But think of the things that that you would you would go on that waiting list for and someone was like, hey, you're uh, you know your your your lungs is not doing that great.

Can grow your new one, uh, you know, nice fresh one, but it will take fifteen to twenty years or your game. So yes, I think, especially if the Aubrey de Gray model of life expectancy actually plays out, So if we actually do see a d four hundred year old people who are needing um different body parts, fresh ones that are that are operating in a way that actually gives them a better quality of life experience than yeah, maybe

fifteen to twenty years, that sent a big deal. Yeah, you says, say you lose an arm fifteen to twenty years to regrow that arm. I think that makes sense. That the question that arises is if we get to the point where you can use some sort of gene tinkering regeneration to regrow that arm of the course of a couple of decades um is it will it? Will it be a faster option by that point just to grow it in a lab to to to use stem cells, use a tissue growing techniques to develop a new arm

and simply transplant that onto the body. Well, that's the That's a great question because we already have the scaffolding in place to essentially grow the structure. So yeah, it'll be really fascinating to see in a decade from now

what the answers to these questions are. I mean, I think I'm gonna go wisdom, so I'll have to say regeneration yea, or we'll we see some of the combination of the two, whereas like you grow me something in the vat and then you're also doing some sort of regeneration technique to make the like the stump meet the new arm. Okay, I'm pondering it. That was a pondering silence all right, think it over and and silence is key, especially if you live out there in the wild, perhaps

near some sort of mysterious moore. Uh, you don't want to party two out. You don't want to play this podcast too loud, because there's a creature out there potentially that may want to come and tear you limb for limb and possibly leave one of his or her own limbs if things get a little too rally, right, Yes, the Grinch Grindle. I wonder if there's some connection there. I've never thought of it. There's got to be some

sort of subconscious thing going on there. Uh. There was an old episode of Tales from the Dark Side in which a Grinch like creature comes and like slays the mother and father who don't believe in Christmas. That's just a long tradition there, because then you have, um, what is the anti Santa clause? Cramp Crampas is very much like the Grinch. So yeah, Crampus, yes, not eating in the first draft at least alright. Well, on that note, let's call over the robot and uh do at least

one listener mail just to keep the robot happy. All right? Here here comes one from our listener in response to the Creepy Music episode the Uncanny Music episode The Science of Uncanny Music. We heard a lot from you guys on this one, and you know, sadly we're not going able to read all the responses, but receive a lot of great content. Uh. In this one, listener says, Hi, my name is Richard Brunner, and I was just writing in to say your episode about creepy music is timely,

and not just because Halloween is coming up. I just finished working as an assistant on a film score for a horror film last week out in Los Angeles, so it's interesting to hear the podcast about horror music. It definitely does add a lot to the scary nature of

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