A Lizard's Tail

Well to begin lets talk about how a lizard can make its tail fall off. The more advanced method is illustrated above. In this method there is a weak spot in a vertebrae and there are special muscles that contract to break the bone releasing the tail. This method also allows for cartilage to regrow from the vertebrae to later replace the tail.

In the second more primative, method muscles squeeze between two vetebre resulting in the loss of the tail. This method is the method that I suspect occurs in the crested gecko as lizards who use this method are unlikely to regenerate a tail; however, I did not look it up so I may be wrong.

I tell you all this because this is what occured the other night...

Well I am sitting on the toilet and Keisha starts screeming bloody murder. So I came running with my drawers around my ankles only to find Keisha looking at dodge in shock with her hands covering her mouth and dodge looking at the ground totally mezmerized. Keisha keeps asking "What is it? What is it?" and I look down to see a wildly wiggling tail doing its job.

It turns out that the whole loosing your tail to avoid predators thing works as there was no lizard in site and my dog was just staring at this thing wiggling in the floor. Which brings up the second problem...

Where is the lizard?

Well I still don't know. And the interesting thing is that this male lizard was paired up with a lady who stayed in the cage. I think this may be because she is a hard woman to live with, as I once put a male in with her only to have him die in a couple of days from the stress. She however decided that she would keep the house and the vines and that he would be the one to leave.

And Keisha... well she freaked out. She was crying and covering her mouth just staring at the wall freaked out because she had never thought about the fact that the tail would wiggle. She thought maybe it was a mutant worm or space alien apparently.

Well a couple of days later she is a bit calmer and has even named the lizard Harry after Harry Potter, The One Who Survived. And we have yet to see him. Hopefully we will before the cat or the dog do.