BLUE TONGUE SKINKS

I remember Brad mentioning something about hay being bad...

What do your lowland savannas look like.

xxmonitorlizardxx wrote:I remember Brad mentioning something about hay being bad...

I questioned whether it should be used in a cage. I'd worry about it molding very quickly and since bts don't really chew, I'd worry about impaction if they decided to eat a lot of it. Never said it was definitely bad, just questioned if it would be safe to use in the cage as bedding/burrowing material.

I personally wouldn't use hay - It has a lovely tendency to catch on fire when exposed to high temps, especially when its damp/dusty/moldy. Ive also pulled hay out of eyes before, but I suppose that could happen with any substrate~

Scotts1au wrote:Mmm mostly bugs, particularly larvae in amongst forest litter, grassy thatch, etc. it is rare to find an obese looking bluey in the wild largely because of there activity levels and the energy expended looking for food. A large part of their natural diet is made of high fat items eith mot larvae ranging from 10-20% fat.

What about snails?

They eat snails, mainly in urban settings. There are relatively few and rather puny native snails in Aus, but they have a particularly liking for European snails (Helix aspera) - which happen to be relatively low in fat by my understanding but then again not a natural food in that sense, if that makes sense :-)

So they eat invasive snails that they haven't evolved/adapted to eat. I guess they don't like the smaller native snails. They find helix aspera in city/towns rather than rural areas, so not really the quintessence of their natural habitat. They also do not have a high amount of fat unlike their normal food items.

So now I have two more questions:
-Is a decent amount of what wild tiliqua eat snails(I guess do snails make up more then about %20 of their diet)
-Would pupae be similar to the larvae they eat?

I'm not sure it is correct to say they didn't evolve with large snails. Over the course of millions of years climates have changed considerably, it may well be that ancestral blueys evolved with similar snails to Helix aspera. They have also adapted to many other invasive/introduced species, including Bitu bush (eat the fruits) and are commonly found in old areas of Bendigo consuming rotten plums etc off the ground. They are quite happy to live off anything that meets their basic nutritional requirements within a pretty wide range. Tiliqua don't generally eat the snail shells. If you watch them, they are quite fastidious in removing the shell prior to eating it. However they will eat small snails whole and often consume a knob of shell which remains at the pinacle of the spiral of a snail after the shell is removed.

In some urban situations snails probably make up more than 50% of blueys diets - we are talking about T.scincoides mainly. Which tend to be more tenacious (read less inclined to select themselves out of life) than blotchies in urban situations by being more secretive and higher fecundity.