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Published in

Brill Academic Publishers, Amphibia-Reptilia, 2(38), p. 238-242

DOI: 10.1163/15685381-00003094

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Unveiling a spatial tail breakage outbreak in a lizard population

Journal article published in 2017 by Conrado Galdino ORCID, Stefânia Ventura, Gladston Moreira
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

Many ecological attributes of organisms vary spatially. This strict dependency upon space generally arises by individuals occupying places with the necessary resources and conditions for survival. For lizards, losing the tail is an evolved mechanism that allows them to escape predators or to avoid aggressive intraspecific agonistic interactions. We evaluated the spatial relation of tail loss in a population of the lizard Tropidurus montanus. Our results support the occurrence of a spatial cluster of autotomized lizards. However, we cannot relate the cluster formation to the crowding of neighbouring lizards nor to individuals’ body size. Tail loss in lizards is known to be related to predatory attacks or intraspecific aggression, and we now show that tail autotomy occurs in a non-random way regarding space, and thus is also related to the space occupied by individuals in populations.