From a bunny’s seemingly-useless fluffy li’l puffball to a scorpion’s practical and deadly venom-filled stinger, the world is filled with all sorts of wonderful tails! And heck, some of them aren’t even tails at all, but that’s ok!
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[Trivia Question]
Seahorse square tail segments
https://today.ucsd.edu/story/why_the_seahorses_tail_is_square_and_how_it_could_be_an_inspiration
[Fact Off]
Swallowtail butterfly tails protect from attacking damage
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/butterfly-wing-tail-loss-break-birds-escape
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-evidence-butterflies-tails-distract-predators.html
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0562
Bird-of-paradise light-absorbing tail feathers
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02088-w
[Ask the Science Couch]
Evolutionary tail loss in some primates (apes)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.14.460388v1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263034/
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/why-don-t-humans-have-tails
[Butt One More Thing]
Ant head mimicry on wasp tail/metasoma
https://www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/article/view/zootaxa.4013.2.9
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-segments-scorpion-metasoma.html