When a tongue goes ballistic.It gives new meaning to the term Deep Throat: a salamander salamander, an amphibian of the order Urodela, or Caudata. Salamanders have tails and small, weak limbs; superficially they resemble the unrelated lizards (which are reptiles), but they are easily distinguished by their lack of scales and claws, and by their moist, that shoots its tongue substantial distances at prey, then retracts the tongue using muscles that originate at the pelvis. Other long muscles allow the hydromantes salamander to launch its tongue like a projectile projectile something thrown forward. projectile syringe see blow dart. projectile vomiting forceful vomiting, usually without preceding retching, in which the vomitus is thrown well forward. , a system that has previously been seen only in chameleons and frogs, according to a report in the Sept. 4 Nature. The salamander goes these other ballistics experts one better. It actually lets fly the entire cartilage of its tongue in the firing, leaving only muscle anchored in the salamander's body. It's a dead-on system. Within a few milliseconds, the sticky pad on the end of the salamander's tongue can retrieve a fly from several centimeters away. The tongue shoots out about 6 centimeters, or 80 percent of the salamander's body length. Stephen M. Deban of the University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal captured the tongue in action while photographing the lung-less salamanders on the island of Sardinia. It's likely that other hydromantes salamanders, including the three California species that are native to North America, use the same ballistic system, according to Deban and his colleague David B. Wake David B. Wake (born June 8, 1936, Webster, South Dakota) is professor of integrative biology and curator of herpetology at the University of California, Berkeley. Wake is an internationally respected expert on speciation and has written widely on the subject. . With Gerhard Roth of the University of Bremen The University of Bremen (German Universität Bremen) is a university of approximately 23,500 people are currently studying, teaching, researching and working from 126 countries in Bremen, Germany. It was founded in 1971. in Germany, they are studying the system to understand how it evolved and how the brain coordinates the muscles that fire the tongue. |
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