sloth unleashed

Some scorpions have a pretty ingenious plan for getting away from predators who grab their tails: they just detach the last few segments of the body and run off, leaving their predator distracted by the still-twitching tail. The plan is not without a few snags, though, since the tail never grows back. A scorpion without its tail doesn’t have a venomous stinger to defend itself or to attack large prey, so it’s reduced to using pedipalps (the front claws) to grab smaller prey. Losing the end of its body also means losing the back portion of its digestive tract. Part of the intestines are gone, as well as the anus, leaving poo to pile up in the scorpion’s abdomen. Luckily (sort of), scorpions don’t make much waste, so this isn’t as big a problem as one might expect, and even more segment-losing events might be able to relieve them of their loads. Males were still able to mate after losing their tails; some scorpion species use the tail for hitting or stinging their partner while mating, but researchers aren’t sure if the scorpions in this study do. So tail-less scorpions seem to get along fairly well, and most lived for several more months in a lab after their incident—but this is a trick they can’t pull off too many times. You only have so many body segments to spare.