Blue Tongue Skink Care Guide: Enclosure, Diet, Handling, and Health

TL;DR

Blue tongue skink care is genuinely straightforward, but only if you know which skink you actually own. Locality determines humidity, and humidity determines whether your skink thrives or slowly declines.

Identify the locality first. Australian skinks (Northern, Eastern) want 40 to 60 percent humidity. Indonesian skinks (Classic, Irian Jaya, Merauke) want 60 to 80 percent. Halmaheras want 80 to 100 percent. Guessing here is the number one way new keepers lose a skink.
Floor space beats height. A 4 foot by 2 foot footprint is the modern minimum for an adult. These are ground dwelling lizards that need room to walk, not climb.
Feed roughly 40 to 50 percent protein, 50 to 60 percent greens, and cap fruit at 10 percent. Adults eat about twice a week, not daily.
Yes, they need UVB. A linear T5 HO tube spanning about half the enclosure, replaced every 6 to 12 months.
Budget realistically. A proper setup runs past $1,000 before you buy the animal, and that animal may live 15 to 20 years or more.

There's a moment that happens in our shop almost every week. Someone leans over a blue tongue skink, watches it lumber across its enclosure like a tiny scaled dachshund, and says some version of: "Wait, they act like that?" Because they do. Blue tongue skinks are curious, deliberate, weirdly personable lizards that will tongue flick your knuckles, climb into your palm, and then stare at you as if waiting for you to explain yourself.

That personality is why they've exploded in popularity. It's also why so many of them end up in trouble. Good blue tongue skink care isn't complicated, but it is specific, and the single most important detail gets left out of nearly every generic care sheet on the internet: not all blue tongue skinks want the same environment. Not even close.

This guide covers what you actually need to know. We'll start with locality, because everything else depends on it, then work through enclosure sizing, heat and lighting, a real feeding schedule you can follow on a Tuesday night, taming timelines that match how these animals actually behave, and the handful of health problems worth memorizing. Whether you're still deciding or you brought one home last week and want to double check your setup, you'll leave here knowing exactly what to do.

Meet the Blue Tongue Skink

Blue tongue skinks belong to the genus Tiliqua, a group of heavy bodied, short limbed lizards native to Australia, Papua New Guinea, and a scattering of Indonesian islands. They're diurnal, meaning they're awake and active during the day, which is a large part of their appeal. You'll actually see this pet.

Their build is unmistakable. Picture a sausage with a lizard's head and four comically short legs. That body plan is built for shoving through leaf litter and loose soil, not for climbing, and it shapes almost every husbandry decision you'll make.

Why That Blue Tongue Exists

The tongue isn't decorative. When a blue tongue skink feels cornered, it flattens its body, hisses, opens its mouth wide, and flashes a startlingly bright blue tongue at whatever's threatening it. To a predator, that sudden flash of unexpected color reads as a warning, and the half second of hesitation it buys is often enough for the skink to escape.

What matters for you as a keeper is what it means in a home enclosure. If your skink is puffing up, hissing, and showing you that tongue, it isn't being dramatic. It's telling you it's genuinely stressed. Back off and try again tomorrow.

How Big Do They Actually Get?

Most blue tongue skinks land somewhere between 18 and 24 inches nose to tail as adults. Meraukes run longer, sometimes reaching 28 inches, which makes them the giants of the group. That's a substantial animal, and it's worth sitting with that number before you buy a tank.

Weight matters more than length for daily care. These are dense, muscular lizards, and their short legs mean a fall from your hands to a hardwood floor can do real damage. Handle low, handle over soft surfaces, and always support the whole body.

Locality Is the Whole Ballgame

Here's the part most care guides skip, and it's the reason so many blue tongue skinks quietly fail in captivity. The genus splits roughly into arid and temperate Australian species and tropical Indonesian species, and their humidity requirements are not remotely similar.

Put a Halmahera in a Northern's dry setup and you'll watch it dehydrate, retain shed, and lose toes. Put a Northern in a Halmahera's swamp and you'll be treating a respiratory infection within months. Same genus. Same shape. Completely different environments.

The Locality Humidity Chart

Print this, screenshot it, tape it inside a cabinet door. This single table prevents most of the husbandry disasters we see.

Common Name	Scientific Name	Origin	Humidity	Difficulty
Northern	Tiliqua scincoides intermedia	Northern Australia	40 to 60%	Beginner
Eastern	Tiliqua scincoides scincoides	Eastern Australia	40 to 60%	Beginner
Classic Indonesian	Tiliqua gigas gigas	Indonesia, New Guinea	60 to 80%	Intermediate
Irian Jaya	Tiliqua sp.	Papua, New Guinea	60 to 80%	Intermediate
Merauke	Tiliqua gigas evanescens	Southern Papua	60 to 80%	Intermediate
Halmahera	Tiliqua gigas (Halmahera)	Halmahera Island	80 to 100%	Advanced

Australian Localities: Northern and Eastern

Northerns are the ones we recommend to first time skink keepers, and it isn't close. Their 40 to 60 percent humidity target overlaps comfortably with a normal climate controlled house, which means you're maintaining a range rather than fighting your thermostat every day.

They're also all captive bred. Australia banned the export of native wildlife decades ago, so every Australian blue tongue skink in the American pet trade descends from animals already here. Captive bred means calmer, parasite free, already eating, and already accustomed to people. That's a meaningful head start.

Easterns are similar in care and slightly less common in the trade. If you find a healthy captive bred Eastern, treat it exactly like a Northern.

Indonesian Localities: Classic, Irian Jaya, and Merauke

Indonesian skinks are gorgeous. They also come with two complications stacked on top of each other.

The first is humidity. Sixty to eighty percent is achievable, but not in a screen topped glass tank in a heated house in a St. Louis January. You'll want a PVC enclosure, moisture retaining substrate, and probably a misting routine. That's a real equipment upgrade, not a minor tweak.

The second is sourcing. A large share of Indonesian skinks reach the market wild caught. Wild caught animals arrive stressed, frequently carry internal parasites, and are considerably more defensive. They can absolutely become wonderful pets, but they need a vet fecal screening, a longer acclimation period, and a keeper who isn't discouraged by early hissing. Ask your shop directly whether an animal is captive bred, and if the answer is vague, that tells you something.

The Halmahera Exception

Halmaheras need 80 to 100 percent humidity. That is a rainforest, not a room. Keeping one properly means a sealed PVC build, an automated misting system, and daily monitoring. They're stunning animals and they're not a starter species. If someone tries to sell you one as a beginner skink, walk away.

How to Tell What You're Buying

Ask. Then ask again in different words. A reputable seller knows the locality, knows whether the animal is captive bred, and can tell you what it's currently eating and what humidity it's been kept at. If a shop can't answer those three questions, they don't know their animal well enough to be selling it to you.

Visually, Northerns typically show bold orange or tan banding against a silvery gray base, with a distinctly stocky build. Meraukes are longer and leaner with a darker, more olive tone and often solid black front limbs. Irian Jayas sit somewhere in between and are notoriously debated even among experienced keepers. When in doubt, husbandry should follow the seller's documented origin, not your best guess from a photo.

Enclosure Setup: Floor Space Wins

Blue tongue skinks don't climb. They walk, dig, and wedge themselves under things. Every dollar you spend on vertical space is a dollar that would have done more good as horizontal space.

How Big of a Tank Does a Blue Tongue Skink Need?

The modern minimum for a single adult is a 4 foot by 2 foot footprint, which works out to roughly 120 gallons in old tank math. Plenty of experienced keepers push that to 5 by 2 or 6 by 2, and if you're keeping a Merauke, seriously consider it. A 28 inch lizard in a 48 inch enclosure can barely turn around comfortably.

You'll still find older guides and some big box pet store staff recommending a 40 gallon breeder. Ignore that advice. It reflects husbandry standards from twenty years ago, and a 40 gallon tank for a two foot terrestrial lizard is not adequate housing by any current welfare standard. Buy the adult enclosure once and skip the upgrade cycle entirely.

Babies are the one nuance worth mentioning. Some keepers find very young skinks get overwhelmed in a huge space and eat better when started in something smaller. If you go that route, plan the upgrade for around six months, and clutter the big enclosure heavily with hides and cover so it doesn't feel exposed.

Glass Versus PVC

For Australian localities, a glass terrarium works fine. The screen top vents excess moisture, which is exactly what a Northern wants, and glass is easy to find secondhand.

For Indonesian localities, PVC is the better tool. It holds humidity and heat far more efficiently, it won't warp or rot the way wood can under constant moisture, and it's dramatically lighter than a glass tank of the same size. Front opening doors are a bonus for a different reason: approaching a ground dwelling animal from above triggers a predator response, while reaching in from the side does not.

Substrate and Burrowing Depth

Give them at least 4 to 6 inches of loose substrate. Blue tongue skinks bury themselves to thermoregulate, to feel secure, and to manage their own hydration. A shallow layer of bedding they can only scrape at is a genuine welfare problem, not a cosmetic one.

Match the mix to the locality:

Australian species: Organic topsoil cut with play sand at roughly a 60/40 ratio holds a burrow beautifully without staying damp. Commercial arid bioactive kits work well here too.
Indonesian species: Organic topsoil, coconut coir, and sphagnum moss. This blend holds ambient moisture without turning into mud. Cypress mulch is another solid option.

If you're already keeping bioactive setups, blue tongue skinks adapt to them readily. A cleanup crew of isopods and springtails handles waste, live plants buffer humidity, and the deep substrate you needed anyway doubles as the bioactive base. We've written plenty about building those systems if you want to go that direction.

Substrates to Avoid Entirely

Skip calcium sand, crushed walnut shell, corn cob granules, and pine or cedar shavings. The first three are impaction risks when a skink inevitably swallows some while eating. Pine and cedar release oils that irritate reptile respiratory tracts. None of these belong in a skink enclosure, regardless of what the packaging claims.

Heating, Lighting, and the Temperature Gradient

Skinks are ectotherms. They can't generate their own body heat, so they move between warm and cool zones to regulate digestion, immune function, and activity level. Your job is to build the gradient and let the animal choose.

Your Target Temperatures

Basking surface: 95 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, measured with an infrared temp gun pointed at a flat stone or slate tile, not at the air.
Warm side ambient: 85 to 90 degrees.
Cool side ambient: 75 to 80 degrees.
Night: A drop to 70 degrees is fine and healthy. Below that, add a ceramic heat emitter or deep heat projector on a thermostat.

A halogen flood bulb is the best basking heat source available. It produces the broad spectrum infrared that most closely resembles actual sunlight, and skinks bask under it the way they would under the sun. Run it on a dimming thermostat so the surface temperature stays where you set it.

Do Blue Tongue Skinks Need UVB?

Yes. This one isn't really debated anymore for diurnal species.

UVB lets your skink synthesize vitamin D3 in its own skin, and D3 is what allows the body to absorb dietary calcium. Without it, the skink starts pulling calcium out of its own skeleton to keep blood levels stable. That's metabolic bone disease, and by the time you can see it, permanent damage has already happened.

Use a linear T5 high output tube running about half the enclosure length, mounted on the same side as the basking bulb so heat and UVB come from one unified sun patch. Replace it every 6 to 12 months. The UVB output fades long before the visible light does, so a bulb that still looks fine can be doing nothing at all. Write the install date on the bulb in marker.

Why Heat Rocks Are Never OK

Reptiles sense heat primarily from above, the way sun works. They're poorly equipped to detect dangerous belly heat, so an animal will sit contentedly on a malfunctioning heat rock while it cooks the tissue underneath. The burns are severe, slow to heal, and entirely preventable. Don't buy them.

Blue Tongue Skink Diet: Feeding the Ultimate Omnivore

Keepers affectionately call blue tongue skinks garbage disposals, and the nickname is earned. In the wild they eat insects, snails, carrion, flowers, fruit, and whatever slow moving protein they can catch. That enthusiasm is charming right up until it becomes an obesity problem.

The 40/50/10 Rule

An adult skink's diet should land close to:

40 to 50 percent protein from insects, lean meats, and snails
50 to 60 percent plant matter from dark leafy greens and fibrous vegetables
No more than 10 percent fruit, treated as dessert rather than a food group

Fruit is where well meaning owners go wrong. It's high in sugar, skinks love it, and heavy fruit feeding drives both obesity and gastrointestinal yeast problems. A few blueberries on a Saturday is a treat. Daily mango is a slow moving health issue.

Safe and Unsafe Foods

Category	Safe and Recommended	Avoid or Toxic
Protein	Dubia roaches, black soldier fly larvae, hornworms, earthworms, captive raised snails, lean ground turkey, boiled chicken, cooked egg	Wild caught insects, fireflies (lethal), raw egg white, frequent fatty rodents
Greens	Collard, mustard, dandelion, turnip greens, endive	Spinach and kale (bind calcium), iceberg lettuce (no nutrition)
Vegetables	Butternut and acorn squash, bell pepper, green beans, grated carrot	Avocado, onion, garlic, rhubarb
Fruit	Blueberries, raspberries, papaya, mango, fig, melon	Citrus, strawberry (poor calcium ratio)

Fireflies deserve a specific callout. They contain compounds that are acutely lethal to reptiles, and it takes remarkably few to kill a skink. Never feed anything you caught in your yard.

The Dog Food Debate

Ask ten skink keepers about canned dog food and you'll start an argument. Here's the honest version of both sides.

People who use it point out that premium grain free wet dog food is dense in organ and muscle meat, fortified with vitamins, cheap, and convenient. Plenty of skinks have lived long healthy lives on diets built around it. That's real evidence and it shouldn't be dismissed.

People who avoid it point out that it's formulated for a mammal's metabolism, not a reptile's. Soft processed food gives no jaw exercise and no foraging enrichment. You can't gut load a can the way you can gut load a roach. And some formulas hide garlic or onion powder in the ingredient list, both of which are toxic to reptiles.

Our practical take: if you use it, use it as one component rather than the whole diet. Choose a premium grain free formula, read the full ingredient list every time you switch brands, mix it with fresh chopped greens, and still offer live insects weekly so your skink gets to hunt something. Purpose built commercial diets like Repashy Bluey Buffet or omnivore link products sidestep the debate entirely and are formulated for exactly this animal.

A Realistic Weekly Feeding Schedule

Feeding frequency drops sharply as skinks mature, and this is where most obesity starts. Owners keep feeding their three year old on a hatchling schedule.

Juveniles, 0 to 6 months: daily to every other day, roughly 60 to 70 percent protein
Sub adults, 6 to 12 months: every other day, roughly 50/50
Adults, 12 months and up: every two days

Here's what a normal adult week actually looks like:

Monday: Two tablespoons of lean ground turkey or a quality commercial omnivore diet, mixed with two tablespoons of chopped collard greens and grated butternut squash. Light dusting of plain calcium.
Tuesday and Wednesday: No food. Fresh water.
Thursday: Live prey day. Five to ten gut loaded dubia roaches or three or four hornworms, with mustard greens on the side.
Friday: No food.
Saturday: Commercial omnivore diet with a few blueberries and chopped dandelion greens. Multivitamin dusting once or twice a month.
Sunday: No food.

Those fasting days aren't neglect. They're how a healthy adult skink is supposed to eat.

Water, Soaking, and the Humid Hide

Provide a shallow, heavy water dish on the cool end, wide enough for the skink to climb in and soak but shallow enough that it can't drown. Change it daily, because skinks defecate in their water with impressive regularity.

Add a humid hide even for arid Northerns. It's just an enclosed cave or a lidded container with an entrance hole, packed with damp sphagnum moss. Inside, humidity approaches 100 percent, and the skink can step into that microclimate whenever it needs help shedding or rehydrating. It costs almost nothing and prevents a category of problems on its own.

Handling and Taming: A Realistic Timeline

Blue tongue skinks have a well earned reputation as one of the most handleable lizards in the hobby. That reputation describes a settled adult that trusts its keeper, not the animal you carried home in a deli cup this afternoon. Trust is built on the skink's schedule.

Weeks 1 and 2: Hands Off

A newly arrived skink is running on stress hormones. It was shipped or driven, moved into unfamiliar territory, and has no reason yet to believe you're not a predator. Set up the enclosure completely before the animal arrives, put it in, and then leave it alone.

Your only interactions for two weeks are changing water, spot cleaning waste, and offering food. Resist the urge to show it off. This period does more for long term temperament than anything else you'll do.

Weeks 3 and 4: Tongs and Trust

Start by simply resting a hand inside the enclosure without reaching for the animal. Let it approach and tongue flick you. That tongue is the skink's primary sensory tool, and it's how it decides what you are.

Then start hand feeding with soft tipped tongs. A hornworm or a bit of banana offered at tong's length builds a straightforward association: this large warm thing brings good food. Keep sessions short and end them before the skink gets tired of you.

Week 5 and Beyond: Picking Them Up

Scoop from underneath with both hands, supporting the chest and the hips. Never lift a skink from above like you're grabbing a sandwich, and never pick one up by the tail. Blue tongue skinks can drop their tails when they feel threatened, and while it regrows, it comes back stubby and discolored, and the process costs the animal significant energy.

Start with two or three minutes and build gradually. Sit on the floor while you do it. Their heavy bodies and short legs mean a drop can cause spinal injury, and floor level handling turns a potential disaster into a short crawl.

Reading Stress Signals

Learn these and you'll almost never get bitten:

Body flattening and puffing: making itself look larger, an early warning
Loud hissing: a clear request for distance
Open mouth with the blue tongue displayed: the final warning before a bite
Frantic scrabbling to get away: the session is over, put it back

A skink that bites is a skink whose earlier signals got ignored. And while a blue tongue bite from an adult genuinely hurts (they have strong jaws built for crushing snail shells), it's almost always a communication failure rather than aggression.

Health: What Goes Wrong and How to Catch It

Most blue tongue skink health problems trace back to husbandry, which is good news. Fix the environment and you prevent the disease.

Retained Shed

When humidity runs too low, skin doesn't release cleanly. It dries in place and tightens like a tourniquet, most dangerously around toes and the tail tip. Blood flow gets cut off, tissue dies, and toes are lost.

Check every shed. If skin remains on toes or the tail, soak the skink in shallow, tepid water for 15 to 30 minutes and work the stuck shed loose with a damp cotton swab. Never peel dry skin off. Then fix the underlying humidity, because a retained shed is a symptom, not the disease.

Respiratory Infections

The opposite failure. Keep an arid Northern on soaking substrate, or house any skink in cold damp stagnant air, and bacteria take hold in the respiratory tract.

Watch for lethargy, wheezing, audible clicking when breathing, mucus bubbles at the nose or mouth, and open mouth breathing. This is not a wait and see situation. Respiratory infections need veterinary antibiotics, and they progress quickly in reptiles.

Metabolic Bone Disease

MBD comes from insufficient calcium, a bad calcium to phosphorus ratio, or missing UVB. The skeleton gets mined for the calcium the body needs elsewhere.

Signs include a jaw that feels rubbery, a kinked or S curved spine, tremors, difficulty lifting the body while walking, and eventually paralysis. Early cases can be corrected with proper lighting and diet. Advanced cases leave permanent skeletal deformity even after treatment. This is the disease your UVB bulb exists to prevent.

Obesity

The quiet one, and probably the most common problem in captive blue tongue skinks. Hearty appetite plus a sedentary enclosure plus an owner who enjoys feeding equals a fat lizard.

Look for fat pads bulging behind the front legs, a belly that spreads wide when the animal sits, and skin folds around the neck. Obesity drives fatty liver disease and shortens lifespan substantially. The fix is the schedule above: twice a week for adults, majority vegetables, fruit as an occasional treat.

How Long Do Blue Tongue Skinks Live?

Fifteen to twenty years is typical with good care, and exotic vets have documented individuals past thirty. That's a dog's lifespan or longer.

Think about that before buying. A skink purchased for a ten year old will likely still be alive when that kid finishes college. It's a genuine long term commitment, and it's one of the best arguments for buying the right enclosure and lighting up front rather than cutting corners you'll pay for over two decades.

Are Blue Tongue Skinks Good for Beginners?

Yes, with an asterisk, and the asterisk is locality.

A captive bred Northern blue tongue skink is one of the finest beginner reptiles available anywhere. It's hardy, forgiving about humidity, genuinely interactive, unlikely to bite, and its care requirements are simple to explain in a single conversation. If someone asks us for a first lizard with personality, this is usually the answer.

A wild caught Indonesian skink is not a beginner animal. Between the humidity engineering, the parasite screening, and the defensive temperament, it asks considerably more of a keeper who's still learning the basics. Start with a Northern, keep it well for two years, and then buy the Merauke you've been eyeing.

The Real Startup Cost

Nobody enjoys this part, but you should hear it before you're standing at a register.

A 4 by 2 enclosure, a quality dimming thermostat, halogen basking fixture, T5 HO UVB fixture and bulb, deep substrate, hides, water dish, and a first vet visit will run you past $1,000 in most builds. That's before the skink. Spread across a 20 year lifespan it's a bargain, but it's a real number on day one, and it's the number that leads people to buy a 40 gallon tank and a coil bulb instead.

Buy the enclosure and the lighting correctly the first time. Everything else can be upgraded gradually.

Questions New Keepers Always Ask

"My skink buried itself and hasn't eaten in two weeks. Is something wrong?" Probably not. Skinks bury themselves for days at a stretch as normal behavior. Australian species also brumate, a winter dormancy where they sleep heavily and refuse food for weeks. Indonesian species come from equatorial climates and generally do not brumate, so a fasting Merauke deserves closer attention than a fasting Northern. Either way, weigh the animal weekly. Steady weight means wait. Dropping weight means call a vet.

"Can I keep two together?" No. Blue tongue skinks are solitary and territorial, and cohabitation reliably produces fights, amputated toes and limbs, and sometimes a dead animal. One skink per enclosure, permanently.

"Is a 40 gallon breeder big enough?" It isn't. Older care sheets say otherwise and they're outdated. A two foot terrestrial lizard needs a 4 by 2 footprint minimum.

Gear That's Worth the Money

You don't need the most expensive version of everything, but a few items are worth buying well:

Enclosure: A 4x2x2 PVC build for Indonesian localities. Glass is acceptable for Northerns and Easterns.
Thermostat: A dimming or pulse proportional unit. This is the single most important safety device in the enclosure, and the cheap on/off models swing temperatures more than you'd like.
Basking bulb: A halogen flood, not a coil or a colored night bulb.
UVB: A T5 HO linear fixture with a 10 to 12 percent bulb, replaced on schedule.
Temp gun: An infrared thermometer for surface readings. Stick on analog gauges are close to useless.
Supplements: A quality all in one calcium and vitamin powder, plus plain calcium without D3 for regular dustings if your UVB is strong.
Substrate: Arid topsoil and sand blends for Australians, coir and moss blends for Indonesians.

Bringing It All Together

Blue tongue skink care rewards keepers who get a handful of decisions right at the start. Identify your locality and set humidity to match it. Give the animal real floor space and deep substrate it can disappear into. Build a proper thermal gradient with a halogen bulb and back it with genuine UVB. Feed twice a week as an adult, weight the bowl toward greens, and treat fruit like candy. Then be patient for a month while a stressed lizard decides you're safe.

Do those things and you'll have a curious, long lived companion that recognizes you, comes to the front of the enclosure when you walk by, and quite happily naps on your lap while you watch TV. Few reptiles offer that.

If you're in the St. Louis area and weighing whether a blue tongue skink fits your home, come talk to us. We can show you the difference between a Northern and a Merauke in person, tell you exactly where an animal came from, and help you build a setup that won't need replacing in a year. Our full library of species care sheets is also available anytime at thetyedyediguana.com/care-sheets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do blue tongue skinks recognize their owners?

Most experienced keepers say yes, and the behavior supports it. Skinks routinely approach a familiar person at the glass while retreating from strangers, and they respond differently to the keeper who feeds them. They aren't bonding the way a dog does, but they clearly distinguish between people and associate specific ones with food and safe handling.

Why is my blue tongue skink's poop so smelly?

Blue tongue skink waste is famously unpleasant, and a diet heavy in protein makes it worse. If the smell has become overwhelming, shift the ratio further toward greens and cut back on rich protein sources like dog food or ground turkey. Spot clean daily, and consider a bioactive setup where a cleanup crew processes waste continuously.

Can blue tongue skinks eat dog food every day?

They shouldn't. Even premium grain free wet dog food is formulated for mammals, offers no foraging enrichment, and can't be gut loaded. Use it as one part of a varied diet mixed with fresh greens, check the label for garlic and onion powder, and keep offering live insects weekly. A purpose built commercial omnivore diet is a better staple.

How do I know if my blue tongue skink is dehydrated?

Look for wrinkled or tented skin that doesn't spring back when gently pinched, sunken eyes, thick stringy saliva, and a history of incomplete sheds. Increase ambient humidity to the correct range for the locality, add or refresh a humid hide, and offer shallow soaks a few times a week. Persistent dehydration despite corrections warrants a vet visit.

What should I do if my new skink won't eat at all?

Give it time first. A skink that's just moved homes may refuse food for one to two weeks while it acclimates, and that's normal. Verify your basking temperature with a temp gun, because skinks that are too cool cannot digest and will stop eating. Try a high value item like a hornworm offered by tongs. If the animal is losing weight or hasn't eaten after three weeks with correct temperatures, get a fecal test done to rule out parasites, which is especially important for wild caught imports.

Cited Bibliography

The Tye-Dyed Iguana. "Reptile and Amphibian Care Sheets (Tiliqua spp.)." thetyedyediguana.com
RSPCA. "Blue Tongue Skink Care Sheet." rspca.org.uk
Chicago Exotics Animal Hospital. "Blue Tongued Skink Care." exoticpetvet.com
The Unusual Pet Vets. "Caring for Blue Tongued Skinks." unusualpetvets.com.au
Zen Habitats / ReptiFiles. "Blue Tongued Skink Care Sheet." zenhabitats.com
Zen Habitats. "Blue Tongued Skink Complete Food Guide." zenhabitats.com
The Bio Dude. "Blue Tongue Skink Care Guide." thebiodude.com
Small Paws Animal Hospital. "Blue-Tongued Skink Care: Enclosure, Diet, Health and Vet Needs." spah.la
Dubia Roaches. "Blue Tongue Skink Care Sheet." dubiaroaches.com
Reptilinks. "A Beginner's Guide to Blue Tongue Skink Care and Feeding." reptilinks.com
Petstore. "Blue Tongued Skink Species Guide: Halmahera, Irian Jaya, and Merauke Compared." petstore.com
All Angles Creatures. "5 Common Northern Blue Tongue Skink Mistakes and How to Avoid Them." allanglescreatures.com
All Angles Creatures. "Blue Tongue Skink Diet Guide: Feeding Schedule, Insects, Nutrition." allanglescreatures.com
Exotics Keeper Magazine. "Blue or False." exoticskeeper.com
Reptile Supply. "What Do Blue Tongue Skinks Eat?" reptilesupply.com
Bean Farm. "Blue Tongued Skink Care Guide." beanfarm.com
Wikipedia. "Blue-tongued skink." wikipedia.org

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