Impacts of caudal autotomy on personality

Caudal autotomy, the voluntary shedding of a tail, is a last-ditch strategy used by many lizard species to escape from predators. There are several costs associated with caudal autotomy that may cause lizards to make behavioral adjustments during tail regeneration. These behavioral changes may be dependent upon individual differences in response to autotomy (e.g. trait or state-dependent differences) and/or the degree of tail loss, as many lizards have the capacity to only partially shed their tail which likely entails fewer costs relative to complete autotomy. However, no study, to our knowledge, has considered how caudal autotomy, or the extent of autotomy, affects individual behavioural variation. Accordingly, we investigated the effects of both partial and complete tail loss on individual behavioural variation in delicate skinks, Lampropholis delicata. We found that lizards which experienced complete tail loss, on average, became less active, explorative and had much slower sprint s...