Sexing My Blue Tongue Skink

[Zailena]

Hello everyone! I recently bought my first blue tongue, and was wondering if someone could give an educated guess at the sex of him/her. He is a Halmahera Indonesian. I've seen the difference between male and female, but it's a bit hard for me to tell and I was hoping someone here had more experience and would have a good guess.

[Y33T]

It takes very close observation to sex blue tongues. The best and most accurate way to sex them is to have another bluey but it is possible to sex your skink without getting another. There's methods like popping/probing but it can be dangerous to inexperienced handlers, there's also a candling method but it's only successful to centralian blue tongues. You could look out for hemipenal bulges, during springtime they swell, if you notice the base of the tail being abnormally wider compared to the rest of the tail you got a male. Very often males "expose" themselves while going to the toilet. You could also take a DNA test but unfortunately it costs a lot of money. My personal guess is that your bluey could be a female judging by the body shape almost similar to my female Eastern. But it may not be entirely accurate though.

[Laceflower]

Blue Tongues exhibit no outward sexual dimorphism. Mine exhibited every "sign" of being female - narrow tail base, narrow head, etc. But "she" dropped sperm plugs after waking up from brumation. There just really is no way to conclusively tell unless you see dropped sperm plugs with their poo, but even then, the absence of plugs doesn't conclusively make it a female, just like never seeing everted hemipenes while he uses the toilet doesn't make him female.

I guess in short, look for stringy white mucus near his poo (not his urate; sperm plugs are a milky translucent color), and of you see them, you've definitely got a boy. If not... well, you may still have a boy. It's so hard to tell with these guys.