Can Alligators regrow their Tails?

Hello guys! I hope everyone is doing fine these troubled times. In case you are a lover of the animal kingdom then i am your guy! I believe that by understanding everything about the biology of animals we will come closer to understand the human body as well as making new discoveries like the airplane for example!

Can Alligators Regrow Their Tails?

After reading this post you will find the answers you seek or don't seek but out of curiosity continued to read. To tell you the truth i really like everything related to nature and psychology so every now and then i will make posts similar to this one!

But let's hop right to it and learn a couple of things you can share with your friends and have a good time, or not!

Alligators regrow their Tails

We are all aware that small lizards and geckos can live without their tails, even make them grow back! In fact, in order to protect themselves, those little devils can self-amputate their tails. That acts as a distraction and they can manage to leave the scene and survive one more day to share the story!

Now scientists wondered how come this only happens in lizards and not alligators. Their thinking was based on the amniote family, a family in which lizards, alligators, and Humans are part!

yep you read correctly, humans!

The common elements between the 3 species of the family are the backbones that called amniotes. I hope that by now you understand the importance of the study, but if not you will get it till the end of the article!

So a team of scientists from Arizona State University and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries with advanced imaging techniques as well as tissue and anatomy methods discovered that in a way they can regrow their tales! You can find the whole study here

Allow me to explain further how exactly it works. You see alligators have a central cartilage skeleton without a bone and that's exactly the spot with regenerative and wound abilities.

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They also discovered that alligators at a young age can also regrow their tail up to 23 cm or 18% of their total body length. Alligators can't self amputate like lizards so this regeneration and regrow can only come from a wound.

By understanding how regeneration and wound healing is happening in the amniote family, we can slowly find correlations that will help us develop medical therapies for problems related to tissue and bones like arthritis, that's why this scientific discovery is so prominent and magnificent to my eyes.