It’s deer season now in the state of Missouri and a lot of my friends are out in the fields, looking to fill their freezer for the year. Me? I usually don’t chase too many deer throughout the season (I’m too busy fishing for trout!)
Here’s the cool part… Every year deer lose their antlers and every year they regenerate a new pair. The really cool things is this: Not only do they replace their lost antlers, they are replaced with an additional point every year! How do they “remember” how many antlers to grow every year? We don’t really know! But there are a lot of scientists out there who are trying to find out.
What we DO know is that a deer’s antlers are grown from a disk of stem cells that regenerate these new antlers every year.
Check out the following link for an outstanding (and brief) video on the role of stem cells in deer:
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/stemcells/deer_antlers.html
