BLUE TONGUE SKINKS

Oh well, poor momma . IJ-F3 was taking too long to give birth , and stopped eating a while ago.
It's been over 5.5 months from last breeding, she was looking stressed , and stopped the heavy breathing days ago
from being too weak.
I came home from work today ,checked her and she was still breathing. I did my rounds checking the rest of the crew.
Went back to see her an hour later, and she passed away while I was away.

Fast forward a bit , about three hours later (I waited too long) I figured I should see what was inside her.
So I tried the Trans illumination thing while it was already dark outside, and the room was black.
So I broke out the flashlight to see what was up, Yup there were babies, you can see all the lumps through her body
with the light. Well I cut her open , she was loaded, but there was one baby blocking her vent sideways .
I guess she was so weak she couldn't push, so they stayed there , and it ended up killing her .
Poor thing, she was born here in 07.

I took them all out one by one , popping each sack removing the membrane and trying to get each one to breath.
No luck at all.
There were 12 babies all perfectly formed , two were runts.

I made this long so the pics don't jump up right away, and freak people out.




I tried to save them .

Here we go !!



















If this happens to anyone else ever, and has to open up a Skink or any Reptile , I think
you might have a chance if you do it as soon as she passes, the babies might still be alive if you work fast.
This was the first time I ever did anything like this, hope I never have to again .

That is beyond amazing.
Horrific for you and I feel for you having to do that, and I am so sorry.
But the amazing thing out of this horrible event is that we get to see something so mind-blowing as this and learn from it.

It took me a while staring at those placenta/yolk sacks to figure out what they were, I couldn't comprehend what parts of the babies those were. They are all lined up facing the bottom!!! Unreal!

I'm sorry, I know i'm not contributing any knowledge to this, but I had to express appreciation to you for posting this, and tell you again that my heart breaks for you over this; I'm so sorry.

Wow. Really sorry Ray. I would like to know if the babies were alive at the time she died. Thanks for taking the time to show us what you learned.

Like the others I find this really fascinating. I've been tempted to do this a couple of times myself, once with an axanthic blue tongue and once with a pink tongue. Both died while heavily gravid. But I chickened out both times so kudos to you for giving it a go. Really interesting to see it done even though the outcome was negative which is a such a shame...

Mark.

Bummer ray but great post,this sort of thing is very interesting,i had to do something similar this season eith my female mertens water monitor,shr layed 3 eggs,seemed fine,started eating vigourously for a few days then went back to nesting and trying to push,stopped all interest in food and died before i could get her to vet,so i did what you did and had to have a look inside

And yep a retained egg,couldnt see anything blocking it but it was noticably large compared to the other 3 and swollen,tried incubating it but went bad 3 weeks in
Its amazing how tight they can pack them in,blueys i mean
I feel sorry for females that squeeze iut litters of close to 20 babies

Yeah I was thinking that Rich. What about my Eastern who had 20 babies last year! Bad news about your female Mertens...

Mark.

Thanks mark,yeah i was quite attatched to that mertens girl

20 is a hefty litter,19 is most ive ever had in an eastern litter


Is it just me or are ij babies stocky buggers,a few litters ive seen lately and they look very stocky compared to scincoides babies

Yes that's right Rich. IJs tend to have smaller litters of larger babies. I've had litters of 4 or 5 huge babies, 3 or 4 times the size of baby Easterns. Mark.

Yeah,size and bulk reminds me of blotchies,especially in comparison to northerns and easterns

Wow, just wow. Very sad but at the same time interesting. So sorry for this!

Cool post Ray! Thanks!

I've seen live puppies come from decesed bitches, but that's if they're taken out immediately, and it's still extremely hard on the puppies. They usually have a hard time thriving, even much later in life. That may be due to not getting colostrum and antibioties from mom, so that may not apply to skinks, but even well vaccinated and well fed, they still have it rough... If you have this experience later (heaven forbid!) And have more success with retrieving the babies, I would be very interested to hear how they do the weeks following.