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ABSTRACT

Anthropogenic changes alter predator–prey systems worldwide. Defensive behaviour is shaped by the costs and benefits for individuals, and we hypothesise that tail shedding, as an escape strategy, has a higher cost for animals in human‐modified environments compared to natural landscapes. Therefore, our central objective was to evaluate the effects of human footprint on the observed frequency of caudal autotomy in geckos. Global. 1964–2023. Lizards. We classified caudal condition as intact, amputated and regenerated in over 140,000 images of 1264 gecko species in the citizen science platform iNaturalist. We included a quantification of tail abnormalities and tested the effects of the Human Footprint Index, body size, habitat preference, and climate variables on autotomy and regeneration rate using two beta‐binomial models. We also reviewed records of caudal autotomy in the literature, searching for relevant articles published in the Web of Science, Scopus and Scientific Electronic Online databases. We identified 14,382 cases of shed or regenerated tail in 748 species among iNaturalist observations. For 631 of these species, autotomy has not yet been described in the scientific literature. We observed caudal abnormalities in 36 species. Tail loss rates dropped from approximately 25% to less than 12% in areas with the highest Human Footprint Index, indicating a strong spatial association between anthropogenic pressure and reduced autotomy. Saxicolous and smaller geckos, independently of phylogeny, had a higher rate of tail loss. We found that gecko tail loss dropped > 50% in areas with high human impact. Despite the increasing number of observations, rates of caudal autotomy decreased from 13.3% in 2000–2011 to 9.7% in 2012–2023, suggesting a trend that could be related to changes in predation pressure or the potential loss of autotomy among geckos under increased anthropogenic landscape transformation.

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