No, this isn’t mistakenly leaving your artificial limb on the train, in order to make a claim to the rail service for losing it, or chopping a finger off on purpose, it’s what some creatures do to save the rest of themselves.

What brought this home to me the other day was a gecko in my kitchen that had managed to land on the top of the hob. Fortunately for him, the hob wasn’t hot, but I felt sorry for him (for argument’s sake, I am assuming here it was male) and I tried to rescue it. My plan was to capture him with the glass and release him back into the wilderness of the garden.

I was alarmed that I managed to catch the tip of his tail with the rim of the glass, which was bad enough, but the tail left the creature instantly and started wriggling madly of its own accord. Do you know, I knew this happened, but I had never witnessed it, nor indeed, been responsible for it. To be honest, I was fascinated and stood there watching it until it stopped. The poor little creature was then deposited over the wall to lick his wounds and grow another one I suppose, which when I looked it up, takes around 30 days.

Worms and other creatures do it too

Nails, horns and anything keratin-related will grow back without help. What about worms I wondered. Well you can cut a worm in half, and both parts wriggle around and I always assumed it then became two fully functioning worms - which it does with some species - but generally the tail end of a worm will regenerate new tail segments rather than a head. How weird is that? They have a decentralised nervous system that allows them to keep moving even after being split apparently.

So bizarrely, no brain is needed? Well, they do have a brain, although they are not particularly complex. Each worm’s brain sits next to its other organs, and connects the nerves from the worm’s skin and muscles, controlling how it feels and moves. Another oddity - they breathe through their skin, so don’t have lungs. They don’t have eyes either, instead, they have cells called receptors that can sense whether it’s light or dark. This allows worms to tell if they’re underground or above ground.


Some Sea Creatures do it

Certain species like sea stars and sea cucumbers can regenerate lost body parts. Other species use different defence tactics, such as the octopus's ink or the physical camouflage of stick insects and chameleons.

Play Dead

Others play dead as a defence mechanism. The classic is the opossum who, when threatened, will growl, hiss, and bare their teeth or climb a nearby tree to escape. If they are unable to escape, the opossum will play dead. Actually, they don’t choose to do it – they experience such intense fear that their bodies lock up, and they can stay in this comatose state for hours, stuck staring blankly ahead with their tongue hanging out till the state passes.

Another thing happens too - they start to emit a bad smell, similar to that of a decaying corpse, which is triggered by this comatose reaction, and the putrid smell, along with their ‘dead’ state, is what drives predators away. They don’t just look dead, they smell like they’ve been dead for a long time, and wouldn’t taste good for dinner. Thankfully you won’t stumble on one of these in Portugal, as they are native to the Americas only.


Humans lose a big body part

We all lose a part of our body on a daily basis – the skin. It’s our largest organ and makes up 16% of our body. Skin cells go through a cycle, transitioning from the middle layer (dermis) to the outer layer (epidermis) over about a month. Normally, these dead cells are naturally shed, at a rate of around an astonishing 500 million particles of skin every day as the epidermis produces a new layer – it gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘skinned alive’!

Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan