The Two-Tailed Skink

Read a story yesterday about two headed fish in Australia. Associated with some kind of runoff from Macadamia nut farms... ??

Are skinks like ghekkos, that lose their tails if you grab em and then grow a new one? Looks like buddy may have grown a new one without losing the old...

Thats a very good theory. Could have damaged the original tail "tricking" the new to grow.

No nuts here. They can all drop their tails I think.

Looks like buddy may have grown a new one without losing the old...

Yes that could have happenend I suppose.

Yes, like geckos, skinks can shed their tails, and yes, the most common cause of 2-tailed lizards is when a lizard suffers a damaged tail and grows a replacement without losing its original tail completely. The injury to the original tail later heals, preventing it from shedding as originally intended. The lizard now has 2 tails as a result.

Seems to make sense. If we could only harvest that gene and make limbs or teeth grow back! Not in my life time I think. Then again, you never know what some people are working on.

Sounds like a good idea. I'm all for it, since that means I can finally regrow my arms and legs and get out of this damned suit of armor once and for all. On the other hand, there are such things as unintended consequences, like what happned to Doctor Curt Connors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_(comics)

Already in the works.

Google "Pig bladder pixie dust" and be start being amazed. There should be some video footage and some articles from last year.

could be, by your geography, this ......here

hmmm... I found this suggestive video of a skink tail...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zXegaZ6pHc

It is nice to see you again Charley. You had a good memory to send us a previously discussed forum details. I was pleasantly surprised that some people remember what was discussed before. Congrats.

There was a program on National Geographic that I saw on the other side of the pond, Atlantic two weeks ago showing all kinds of animals with oddities specialy two heads and tails etc. One calf had one leg hanging from its shoulder. Although nature does not tolerate imperfections but these oddities do exist.

So skunk with two tails? it is possible that the nature let it go thsi time.

Regards;

Nadeem

I was confused initially i thought you meant a skunk with 2 tails

Would it be twice as fragrant then?

If certain glands were doubled also, then probably

I was even more confused, I thought "Skink" was the plural of "Skunk"......so I was expecting 2 Skunks, each with 2 tails.

I was bitterly dissappointed!!!!

Two headed fish in Queensland river Australia.

Two days ago I saw a news article about two headed fish larvae in the Namoi river in Queensland Australia. There were millions of the fish hatched that way. They tracked it down to pesticides that were used to treat the macadamia trees. These pesticides were banned in the US, but there may be other chemicals that can cause the damage. Usually, as with these fish, most mutations do not lead to a living adult organism.

Another cause could something as simple as a freek accident that happened at a young age causing the tail to heal with two growth centers. Humans with pierced tongues can go to the extreme and also have split tongues.

If it is chemically caused, I would expect to find more split tail salamanders in the area.

Have fun, and don't drink the water.

Ed

Hi Dr Ed,

Here in the UK we have a much bigger and scarier problem, gender bending chemical polutants like Bisphenol-A (BPA), Phthalates, Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers and Oestrogen have been leaking into the rivers for many years, this has caused male fish to change into females!

Scientists here think that these waterborn chemicals are the root of the problems with decreasing male fertility and genital deformities in the UK. This has to be stopped, but big business won't allow it to be??????

Spencer.

We have been finding pharma's hundreds of miles from any apparent source. Everything from antidepressants to erectile dysfunction drugs.

Here is a link of some of the US and EU info...........here

Well, it's easy enough to do public education about flushing old drugs. The problem is, our present model of medicine (so lucrative for big pharma) involves flooding the body with huge doses of drug, sufficient to take over from/override and swamp the internal management systems that would tend to compensate for foreign bioactive stuff. The excess drug involved is peed away. So as long as we are using this model of medicine, there is going to be drug runoff into the environment. Unless we adopt some sophisticated filtering systems, of course.

Presently I'm using a very efficient drug filter with no moving parts, that prevents any of this crud from entering my mouth in the first place...

What the heck is going on over there? These 2 headed fish reports are sorta creepy. I don't think they could use the excuse that they damaged the first head and grew another without shedding the first one. When I read the headline I first said what the hell is a skink anyway? There was no way I could keep from reading on after that. I have to agree that the lizard probably did damage the first tail and grew another but the fish I think is a very different story. One thing for sure IMO is don't eat those fish and/or drink that water. Also I have to ask is what do you do with those 2 tailed skinks after you shoot them?

Remember, we are in Australia and shooting is not something any one can just do. You need a gun license.

These Skinks, Skunks, Salamanders, Geckos, Lizards are as nimble as. If I could I would have caught it. Just taking the shots (photos) was hard enough. Never saw one again.

Water can not be the problem here. We have more than enough of that wonderful stuff. 700 mm in the last few days. That little reptile has never been close to any pharmacy products or byproducts. This is a little Island off the coast of Australia and it is not used to dump hazardous stuff. So we all think.

A damaged tail doing a bit of genetic overtime is possibly the reason, I hope.

To all the Americans contributing to this post, congratulations to you and your new President. May he never talk with a forked tongue, Ky.

Hello Australia, Texas, the UK and points in between.

About 9 months ago the Associated Press had the drinking water tested for a host of pharmaceuticals in about twenty US cities. They found many drugs in the water even from sites that had no known upstream sources of contamination.

I recall from the early days of highly sensitive immunoassays for estrogens, that enough estrogens evaporated from the skin and breath of women technicians during certain parts of their menstrual cycle that it contaminated the assay results. I would venture that many of these long-lasting, non-biodegradable compounds are similarly volatile, are carried in the water cycle and reach remote places in the rain and snow.

I suspect that it is more than the UK that has rivers with 'happy, hairy, transgender fish, with their erectile dysfunction corrected."

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!" (Pogo)

Fortunately, we are also the solution.

Ed

Hey why we are on the subject (kind of) could you give us the low down on the new Australian gun laws that supposedly prevent the regular law abiding people from owning guns? It is hard for me to believe you all gave up your guns. I have been seeing some emails with these crime statistics that show the crime has really skyrocketed after the law was carried out. Is this true? What I gathered from the info. I got was that the criminals didn't give up their guns like the law abiding people did and now they are reaping the benefits of it. Please understand I am not saying this is true but asking could it be. If it is true I hope passing a similar law in the US is not one of Obama's changes he isn't talking about.

pipewelder

We had the Port Arthur (Tasmania) incident were , if my memory serves me right 37 people were gunned down by some maniac. I think it was in 1989/90 and the then new Prime minister (Thankfully he is gone now) had all the support he needed to introduce the law. No more guns. People were paid to have them destroyed.

In the Outback and on farms people still have guns, legally. Many blokes have stashes of guns hidden I suppose. Who is going to know in a Country as large as this. You could hide an army and nobody would find it.

The criminals have their own rules which they go by and that is going to stay like that, sadly. Never mind the statistics there will always be more good than bad. All the best, Ky.