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At a nail salon in Los Angeles, Elle Woods introduced her to a nail technician named Paulette. bend and catch: the perfect way to get someone’s attention, and at least in the universe of “Legally Blonde” movies, it’s the only move that yields an 83 percent return on a dinner invitation.
Now, let the scorpion and its notorious tail introduce you to twists and turns: perhaps an even better way to get someone’s attention. If you’re a bug, you can also expect a dinner invitation (with you on the menu).
Parts of the scorpion’s tail can move in many ways: twisting up and down, twisting left and right, and twisting and twisting at the same time. A new three-dimensional reconstruction of this aggressive body part reveals a special joint unique to the animal kingdom that allows the tail to bend and twist. The research, which details a structure familiar to many scorpion biologists but never formally described, was published Wednesday. Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
“No one has looked at the structure that allows this deadly weapon to move so precisely through space,” said Alice Günther, a graduate student at the University of Rostock in Germany and author of the paper.
“This work does a great job of really digging into the complexity of something we’ve all observed but never been able to quantify,” said Lauren Esposito, curator of arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the research.
Scorpions roamed the Earth 435 million years With a flexible, segmented body part also called a metasoma. This area is often called the scorpion’s tail, but technically it’s not a true tail because it doesn’t cross the anus (more precisely, it includes the anus), according to Arie van der Meijden, a biologist at the Center for Biodiversity Research. Genetic Resources in Portugal not included in the study.
But we call them tails, and scorpions use them for everything important to an arthropod: killing, mating, digging, defecating, and defending themselves. Some sensual scorpions engage in courtship rituals that involve banging and sticking their tails, while other scorpions rub their stings against their bodies to make a chirping sound to deter predators, he said. that’s pretty surprising.”
Dr. van der Meijden echoed this sentiment. “If you’re trying to wrestle a scorpion, as I often do, they can almost turn their tail and sting you in all directions,” he said.
The tail becomes even more surprising when you consider that it is an extension of the scorpion’s segmented body. Unlike a pig’s fold or a raccoon’s striped feather duster, a scorpion’s tail also contains the guts of arthropods and the abdominal nerve cord, the invertebrate equivalent of the human spinal cord. So while a scorpion’s tail is twisted and twisted, it also moves solid waste into its anus so it can defecate through its tail.
Dr. Esposito sees the tail as “a clever solution to the constrained body parts and mechanics”, but conceded that the logistics of the scorpion’s defecation were “a bit odd”.
After identifying the unknown joints in 16 scorpion species, the researchers selected the female Mesobuthus gibbosus, a camel-colored scorpion that is slightly shorter than a crayon, as the tail model. They scanned the scorpion’s metasome using a type of CT imaging and compiled the scans to reconstruct the tail in three dimensions. They then 3D-printed large-size versions of each part to test real-life range of motion.
A scorpion’s tail is essentially a tube made up of five barrel-shaped segments surrounding the gut. The reconstruction found that the first four parts were connected to each other and to the central part of the scorpion’s body via a previously unidentified joint. Each barrel has an opening at the rear end through which the front end of the next section can sit, bend and rotate. Dr. Günther compares it to a ball joint, but no socket. The tail of the scorpion has only the ball, that is, the rounded edge of the joint.
The absence of a slot allows the tail sections to bend up and down and bend left and right, and twist and bend at the same time. Dr. Pointing to the Zoom call with his finger, van der Meijden said that a scorpion bends its tail the same way we bend our finger. But he can also bend his tail like a chain, he said, and grimaced as he personally showed his inability to bend a human finger.
The researchers called this joint form a “sliding-rolling pair” because the segments slide during bending and can roll during bending.
However, Dr. That key question—whether the joint slides against the connector or rolls like a wheel — remains unanswered, van der Meijden said. “If you roll over, the position of the joint changes,” he said. “And sliding causes more wear on the joint.” Dr. This question can be easily answered by shooting a close-up video of a live scorpion, van der Meijden said.
The fifth, last section in the scorpion’s tail is narrower than the others and cannot be bent, only bent. But the authors write that the rest of the tail is so good at twisting and twisting that it would be unnecessary to twist the last section.
Of the more than 2,000 scorpion species known to science, many have wildly different tail types. Some, like flat rock scorpionThey have long and thin tails like ziti trains. Others, as aptly named fat scorpion, they have more garbage in their trunk. But most likely know the same trick: twisting and twisting.
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