It started with wanting to animate a fish licking his chops after consuming a tasty morsel. The fish model had no tongue. Seeing as how I've become friendlier with splines and CP's, I thought no problem. Wrong. I'm running into the same problem that I had with the pump hose that I did a couple of weeks ago.
I obviously don't understand kinetic or inverse kinetic constraints. With this fish tongue there are a total of nine bones in line. I want to be able to grab the end of the bone at the tip and more or less drag it into position, with the bones acting like links in a chain. What would be the constraints and relationships from bone to bone that would help me to accomplish this. I feel that if I just had a better understanding of some of the basics, things would begin to make logical sense
Thanks in advance for your help.

Here's a tongue example project made from deconstructing Squetchy Sam to make it easier to see what's going on.

Hope that helps.

Thanks, David.

I downloaded the project, and just watching it move as I move the target around was pure beauty! I'll be studying this intensely in the next day or so while I figure out what questions I need to ask.
I knew that eventually I'd have to delve into this aspect of A:M, and I believe this is a perfect opening.

I'll have, hopefully, the right questions soon.
Thanks again

David,
I think I need to take this in small bites. First Bite:
As far as I can tell, you have three types of bones here:

1: tongue_1

2: tongue_SQUETCH_target_1

3: tongue_1_geometry

Question: Are tongue_1 and tongue_1_geometry the same bone, or did you color code them for clarity?

Question: Is a target bone a Null with a bone constrained to it?

Which bone would be constrained to the tongue_SQUETCH_target_1 bone, the tongue_1 bone or tongue_1_geometry bone?

The bones with "geom" in their name are attached to the model's geometry. The bones named like "tongue_1" are control bones that are located in the same position as the "geom" bones and have the "squetch nulls" as children (like "tongue_SQUETCH_target_1"). The "geom" bones are set to "translate to" and "aim at" the "squetch nulls" with "scale to reach" and "Z axis only" on and an Expression on the "X" and "Y" scaling to maintain volume ("1/Sqrt(..|Z)")...so the scaling of the control bones will squetch the "geom" bones. The tongue target bones (like "tongue_target1") are used to aim the tongue control bones (like "tongue_1"). There are also some "roll like" and "orient like" constraints on the control bones so that rotating the "tongue_target" will affect the control bones.

Hope that helps.