A video shows a severed gecko’s tail gyrating in just the way described in Martin Eiger’s limerick:
Higham and Russell expound
On autotomy. Here’s what they found:
The tail of a lizard,
When severed or scissored,
Goes flipping and flopping around.
Investigator Dany Adams alerts us to a video of the kind of severed gecko’s tail wag that’s celebrated in the recent Severed Gecko’s Tail Limerick Competition (which asked for a limerick to honor the study “Flip, Flop and Fly: Modulated Motor Control and Highly Variable Movement Patterns of Autotomized Gecko Tails,” Timothy E. Higham and Anthony P. Russell, Biology Letters, 2009).