Trophic Memory, Deer, and a Truly Unique Scientific Object
16th June 2026
What they found was that if an injury occurs at a particular point in the branched structure of the antler, it makes a small callus and heals; the rack will be shed as normal, and next year, a new rack will grow, with an ectopic tine (branch) at the location where the damage occurred in the previous year. This is one of my favorite examples when I teach developmental biology students, on the topic of “here are some things not in your developmental biology textbook”. Using the tools we normally use in the field – chemical gradients, gene-regulatory networks, molecular pathways – try to come up with a model of how the point of damage is sensed at one location of a complex structure, then the whole thing falls off, and the memory is somehow kept – where – in the growth plate on the scalp? And then months later, a new structure appears, with a pattern dictated not just by the emergent result of genetically-encoded protein production (hard enough to explain) but also by the previous physiological experience of cells that are no longer here, which tells bone growth dynamics to take an extra turn and grow out in a very specific place. The effect disappears after a few years and they go back to normal.
Trofim Denisovich, call your office.