Insects and mice should constitute almost 40% of your Blue Tongues Skink’s diet which means that you need to know, in detail, which insects you can feed to your reptile as well as how you need to cut them up and feed to the reptile. If you offer insects to the reptile in a proper way, they can prove to be an exceptional source of nutrition for them. Obviously, the insects should be a live food choice and should include meal worms, super worms, butter worms, wax worms and silk worms. Silk worms are normally the hardest to find but they are also the healthiest for the reptile. You can also feed your reptile with earthworms, slugs and snails; snails are very important because their shells are complete with the best form of calcium.
One of the issues related to insects is where you should get the insects from; normally they should not be from the wild or from your backyard. This is because they could have been sprayed with insecticides or other sprays that can be transferred to the belly of your reptile. This is especially true in heavily populated urban areas. So you should always prefer to get your insects from a pet shop or a reptile food supply store. If you do get your insects from the wild, you need to detoxify them by keeping them in a bucket with leaves and water, for a day or two. If the insects live by the end of their period, they are healthy enough for your reptile because they have rid their bodies of any possible contaminants. Otherwise, if the insects were heavily poisoned, they would probably not survive this time period in the bucket.
Crickets and mealworms do not have any nutritional value as diet for your skink so there is no point in giving the reptile these insects but even if you do, you can dust them with calcium and other supplements to make them have some nutritional value.
As far as mice are concerned, you can feed a baby or fuzzy mouse but only to adult lizards because baby reptiles will not be able to chase them or eat them. Some people don’t believe in allowing the blue-tongued skink to hunt and therefore offer frozen mice to them which is completely okay but feeding live mice is a way of keeping the reptile’s hunting instinct sharp and alive. Some people might even gut load their insects with special diet before feeding to the reptile but this is an unnecessary procedure since insects already have a high nutritional value.
