Tails

From a bunny’s seemingly-useless fluffy li’l puffball to a scorpion’s practical and deadly venom-filled stinger, the world is filled with all sorts of wonderful tails! And heck, some of them aren’t even tails at all, but that’s ok!

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[Trivia Question]

Seahorse square tail segments 

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/why_the_seahorses_tail_is_square_and_how_it_could_be_an_inspiration

[Fact Off]

Swallowtail butterfly tails protect from attacking damage

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/butterfly-wing-tail-loss-break-birds-escape

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-evidence-butterflies-tails-distract-predators.html

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0562

Bird-of-paradise light-absorbing tail feathers

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02088-w

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/new-vogelkop-superb-bird-of-paradise-changes-up-the-old-song-and-dance/

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/20/20813054/vantablack-ultrablack-black-material-surrey-nanosystems-carbon-nanotubes-science-materials

[Ask the Science Couch]

Evolutionary tail loss in some primates (apes)

https://www.science.org/content/article/jumping-gene-may-have-erased-tails-humans-and-other-apes-and-boosted-our-risk-birth-defects

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.14.460388v1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263034/

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/why-don-t-humans-have-tails

[Butt One More Thing]

Ant head mimicry on wasp tail/metasoma

Image: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Posterior-metasomal-tergites-and-ovipositor-of-Clistopyga-caramba-sp-nov-holotype_fig2_281632324

https://www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/article/view/zootaxa.4013.2.9

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-segments-scorpion-metasoma.html