NOUN
- spontaneous removal or casting off of a body part (as the tail of a lizard or claw of a lobster) especially when the organism is injured or under attack
How To Use autotomy In A Sentence
- The characteristics that best predicted autotomy - smaller body size or female gender - also correlated with a lower escape rate by the alternative escape tactic, struggling and pinching the predator.
- October 26, 2005 22: 46 autotomy: hey logan5, this mix is awesome, thanks for putting it up. Headline: Boston inspires Robot (Music (For Robots))
- Most investigation into such an antipredatory benefit has focused on caudal autotomy in vertebrate taxa.
- Passive modes of defence are as many and varied as are the active; one of the strangest and most inexplicable of these is that known as spontaneous amputation, technically termed autotomy. The Human Side of Animals
- Some crabs employ an aggressive form of autotomy.
- The nerve, however, is severed at the preformed autotomy breakage plane and the nerve stub retracts into the coxal stump.
- Slow-worms are like many other squamates in being able to drop the tail voluntarily by contracting muscles (this is known as caudal autotomy), but they do this more than is usual, with most individuals having autotomised their tails several times. Archive 2006-05-01
- Some crabs employ an aggressive form of autotomy.
- In the fiddler crab Uca pugilator, limbs that are lost due to injury or predation and as a result of the reflexive autotomy response, can be regenerated completely during a single intermolt cycle.
- Overriding of the molt-inducing stimulus of multiple limb autotomy in the mud crab Rhithropanopeus harrisii by parasitization with a rhizocephalan. Parasite Rex
