Unwrapping broken tails: Biological and environmental correlates of predation pressure in limbless reptiles

Studying species interactions in nature often requires elaborate logistics and intense fieldwork. The difficulties in such task might hinder our ability to answer questions on how biotic interactions change with the environment. Fortunately, a workaround to this problem lies within scientific collections. For some animals, the inspection of preserved specimens can reveal the scars of past antagonistic encounters, such as predation attempts. A common defensive behaviour that leaves scars on animals is autotomy, the loss of a body appendage to escape predation. By knowing the collection site of preserved specimens, it is possible to assess the influence of organismal biology and the surrounding environment in the occurrence of autotomy. We produced data on tail loss for 8,189 preserved specimens of 33 snake and 11 amphisbaenian species to investigate biological and environmental correlates of autotomy in reptiles. We applied generalized linear mixed effect models to evaluate whether body ...