Taking Care of Newborn and Juvenile Skinks

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The birthing process for the Blue Tongued Skink is a simple process and it should normally go uninterrupted for the female giving birth. Normally, a female skink will give birth to five to fifteen Blue Tongues Skinks; while it may more than hard for you to accommodate all of the babies in your house, it is a good idea to keep a couple of them for further breeding. The rest of the babies, you can either share with friends or family or sell on the internet to other skink lover and enthusiasts.

The good thing about newborn skinks is that they do not require any help or feed from their mother after the second they are born. The bad thing is that they can only be housed together with the help of towels and substrate until their first shed after which they can become territorial. You should make regular contact with all the baby blue tongue skink reptiles as early after the birth as possible and continue to do so later because the more they will be used to human interaction, the less chance that they will exhibit signs of violence towards each other.

Even if you are keeping the babies together in a large tank of about 20 gallons, try feeding them separately especially if it’s a live feed because after the first couple of feeds, baby skinks’ might confuse wriggling worms and insects with the feet and nails of their brothers and sisters. The feed of baby reptiles like the Blue Tongued Skink will essentially be similar to that of their parents. Only for the first couple of weeks, you should feed them with soft cat food, which will be easy for them to ingest and keep in. After that, you can start with finely chopped vegetables, fruits, insects and everything else that you feed adult BTS reptiles. For the first eight to twelve weeks, do not feed the juvenile reptiles mice or any other rodents.

They will also require good heated and lighted atmosphere; use a 50-100 watts bulb for this purpose and take the babies out in the natural sun for a while everyday as well. In their terrarium, make sure there is a basking point as well as a cool-off point and the water bowl should be shallow for the babies; you can use something like an ashtray. Give them plenty of hiding spaces in the terrarium to keep them happy and to keep their curiosity alive.