Wiki site of the practical exercise of the VII Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology.

Here you will find the exercise assignment and the group's products.

If you are a group member login to edit this page, create new pages from it, and upload files.

Autotomy, or self-amputation, is an active form of defense from predators in which an animal sheds a body part when attacked. Despite sounding strange, it is performed by many species of reptiles, insects, arachnids and mollusks. In insects and arachnids, the amputated body part is usually a leg, so that even when the part cannot be regrown, it has some sort of backup (insects and arachnids have lots of legs, in case you didn’t notice).

Recently, however, a very unusual and unexpected kind of autotomy has been discovered in arachnids: it has been found that some scorpions of the family Butidae may self-amputate their tails. This it surprising not only because the tail does not have a backup and cannot grow back, but also because by losing the tail the scorpion loses its anus! And yes, this does generate the sort of problem you are thinking about right now. Nevertheless, autotomized scorpions can endure for a long time and even reproduce.