« "Hey, I'm Weird, Too!" | Main | The Good Edwards » Wednesday Regenerative Animal Blogging02 May 2007 03:31 pm Craig explains my thinking on the subject of regenerative lizards: "some reptiles will regenerate tails. Specifically some geckos (Leopard gecko being one) will lose tails as a way of getting away from a predator. It does grow back." Pithlord, however, has the goods: Right, but you don't get a whole new lizard. If you do it right, you can bisect a starfish and get two. Advantage: starfish! Heh. Comments (17)
Heh indeed. Makes me think of that very bad movie, Starfish Troopers......... 
I'd like to ask the audience at home not to go around bisecting starfish in the hopes of creating two.
mds: Oh, come on, can't all we members of the Deuterostomia superphylum just get along? Posted by: mds | May 2, 2007 4:20 PM
"Right, but you don't get a whole new lizard. If you do it right, you can bisect a starfish and get two. Advantage: starfish!" You can do it with flatworms too, but they are even cooler. If you just slice their head in half, each side can grow back so you get a two-headed flatworm. Though I don't know that it really is a head. It might just be the end that is in front when it moves around. Flatworms aren't all that big on the whole centralized nervous system business.
"You can do it with flatworms too, but they are even cooler. If you just slice their head in half, each side can grow back so you get a two-headed flatworm. Though I don't know that it really is a head. It might just be the end that is in front when it moves around. Flatworms aren't all that big on the whole centralized nervous system business." Now I'm curious. How far along can one keep doing this? I mean, could I split a flatworm's heads until I get a flatworm with 512 --- no, 2048! --- heads? Because if I could, I might try.
When I was 9 or 10, I was chasing a gecko around the house so that I could take it outside and save it from the cat; I approached the immobile gecko with my hand and *floppity flop* the tail AND the back legs of the gecko just released from the rest of the animal and started running around on their own, blood spurting everywhere. I didn't even come close to touching the gecko. Since then I have been horribly afraid of geckos. Also, a gecko killed my dad.
The starfish's superior ability to regenerate has been adopted as a metaphor for the power of decentralized, leaderless organizations. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations I imagine the book has a ready audience in the blog triumphalists.
The starfish's superior ability to regenerate has been adopted as a metaphor for the power of decentralized, leaderless organizations. Obviously, the author has never heard of Starro the Conqueror, or he'd have never suggested such a silly thing. Also, the blogosphere is not a distributed organization for two reasons. (1) There are no institutional constrants on blogging, generated from above or within. Even if I'm wrong about that, (2) blogs are not leaderless, all bloggers being controlled through the internet by sonorous Neptunian bat-trumpets.
God, I'd hate to think I passed on a meme favoured by blog triumphalists. I might have to shoot myself, and I lack the regenerative powers of a starfish. I would hope the Reynoldsites would at least admit that there are downsides to radial symmetry. For instance, your mouth and your anus have to be the same hole.
I would hope the Reynoldsites would at least admit that there are downsides to radial symmetry. For instance, your mouth and your anus have to be the same hole. While clever, this is not correct. A starfish's mouth is on the bottom and its anus is on top, preserving radial symmetry with two holes. (IIRC, the key developmental distinction between echinoderms and other deuterosomes is which opening in the early embryo develops into the mouth and which into the anus. So maybe there's still a Reynolds joke in there somewhere.)
So maybe there's still a Reynolds joke in there somewhere And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't have been for you kids and your damn self-correcting Internet!
Dost the Atlantic know that stewing in its belly is a fluke of a worm, a fishy star of revolting luminescence, that has but one head, yet demonstrates at the very least 20 functional, persistently chirruping anuses? It is a coarse chorus but then again, the internet is but a series of tubes, emptying out into a giant, gaping cloaca we call the blogosphere. Less synthesizer, more sewer, the Atlantic— an ocean of filth in its own right, stepping-stone-less, lily-white-launching-pad welcome mat for pallid oppressor-rapists— has dipped its toes in a curdled consommé of croaking crepitus? Ah yes, flagship poeta de la red, el capitan Andrés Sullied Sullivan glowers from the stern, barking orders at his baying bevy of canine crewmn, the saturnine seamen of the soggy isle— in unison, "I CLAIM THIS LAND FOR SPAIM." Save us, Ghost of Columbo, your russian swimsuit trailing like a black flag of inward surrender.
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't have been for you kids and your damn self-correcting Internet! Oh, come now. Just say you got the starfish confused with Glenn Reynolds, whose mouth and anus obviously are the same. See? Easy. Also, "Starfish Superphylum" would be a cool name for a band.
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Heads in the Sand
Why are all of you folks trying so hard to sell car insurance?
Posted by Petey | May 2, 2007 3:42 PM