What is It? Video Addition

Click on the video below and see if you can answer the question:

What is it?



So, is it...

1. a baby snake
2. a leech from some lettuce we just bought
3. a gecko tail
   
4. a centimeter worm (we use the metric system here)

I will leave some a bunch of blank space here so you can't cheat and see the answer quite yet. Make a guess and then scroll down to find out what the little wiggly thing is.



















So, what is it? Well, it is actually a gecko tail. Geckos are ravenous little skeeter eaters (they eat lots of other insects too). But just because they spend their lives eating dusty-winged moths and other mouthwatering treats, doesn't mean they don't find themselves on the other end of the fork occasionally. That is to say, geckos eat some things and some things eat geckos. Birds, other lizards and geckos, or in this case, our dog.

Our dog saw a four-legged long-tailed toy running down the sidewalk and tried to play with it. The gecko didn't care for the game, but it was a bit too slow. Our dog snipped her pointy puppy teeth right onto the gecko's tail. Ouch!

No problem. The gecko had a secret weapon...the tail is a break-away. It snaps right off like a piece of Legos. Our dog ended up with a tiny tail and the gecko ended up with a scary story to tell all the other geckos around the campfire that night.

Lots of lizards have this nifty feature. Some don't even need a dog to help snap the tail off. They can just flex their little lizard muscles and pop their own tail right off. But the tail has little muscles of its own too. And those little muscles keep twitching and flipping around so that the tail looks like a tasty treat too. While the hungry gecko-eater is getting ready to munch of the delicious market-fresh all-organic tail, the rest of the gecko is getting away and living to flee another day. This particular tail kept on dancing around for over 15 minutes after the gecko left it behind.

Giant Leaf-Tailed Gecko from Madagascar

It doesn't hurt the gecko and special cells even keep it from bleeding. Geckos do store fat in their tails, so it does lose some of its well-deserved energy. And until a new tail grows back (yep, they just grow a new one), they can't use the cool tail trick to get away from predators.

And how cool is this? Sometimes a bit of tail is left behind, so that little bit grows back into a full-sized tail too. Add that to the new tail it normally grows and you end up with a two-tailed gecko.