BLUE TONGUE SKINKS

After a month of careful observation, I've managed to sex one group of skinks...to my dismay (although not necessarily surprise), we ended up extremely male heavy in Irian Jayas. Combination of sperm plugs in cages and behavior made most of the boys pretty obvious.

Anyone interested in these, btw, will be able to purchase them from the LLL site next week - I'm sending 4 of them back to the store to be sold. Haven't made up my mind which 3 I'm keeping for sure, yet.

Male 1 - tried copulating with one of the two 99% sure females, goes for other males aggressively


Male 2 - found sperm plugs in his cage, tries copulating with the females and launches himself at other males


Male 3 - sperm plugs, aggressively goes for other males


Probable male 4 - did not behaviorally sex with other males but was courting females, no sperm plugs found in cage


And one of the probable females - she won't let anyone copulate with her, but all the boys sure do try. She's been housed alone for almost 8 months now, so I doubt she's gravid, but she also won't breed... *sigh*


That's what I have pics of for now, anyway. Thought I'd share the results of my efforts over the last month

-Jen

Male 3 is definitely a scincoides looking bub!

Dakota wrote:Male 3 is definitely a scincoides looking bub!

He's a wild caught import, so I doubt there's much scincoides in there.

Not saying he has any in him, he is just one of those IJ's that look more like scinoides than the typical ones.

With the Eastern breeding with the Indonesian theory, haha.

Those are all amazing. Males 3 and 4 are both stunners though!

It's funny how some species seems to be heavy in one gender or the other. With scincoides, everyone I know in the U.S. struggles to come up with males. With gigas, all of the best animals seem to be male. I.J.'s don't have a species yet, but if a large sample size were to show that they seem to be predominately male..., maybe that would be a mark on the side of them being gigas? Just thinking out loud.

With imports,its probably because males wander more so are come accross more often,ive found with babies people often choose the bigger babies or juvies,i used to hang on to baby blotchies like that and end result was 90 percent they ended up being males,same happened with my kimberley northerns,mostly bigger ones were taken ,i hung on to one big one i liked and 6 small ones,couple were tail nipped but ended up being one male and 6 females funnily enough,might have been lucky there though but it pays to get a mix of baby sizes i suspect,little ones often out grow the solid babies with blotchies anyways

Jen that suspect female is a tank,couple of the males i would have leaned female on,shows they can be tricky to sex at times,there all nice looking ij,s

Thanks guys!

Yeah, with as chunky as so many of them are I held out hope for a while that there'd be some gravid females in there. NOPE. I'll have to post pics of the indos - ALL of em, chunky as hell and I've dropped all their feedings back to only once a week.

Richard, there's a similar theory out there for wild caught monitors, too. I used to keep roughnecks and many of the larger adults I'd find would turn out to be male.

Jeff - the littler "classic" (as I call em) indos all seem kind of male-y to me. One of em everted a hemipene on me and the bulges at the base of his tail look awfully similar to the rest. 5 is kind of a small sample size but I do think it'd be weird to have all 5 turn out to be male. I'll be grouping those next week to try and behaviorally sex em.

A little side note - anyone ever see one of these give birth? I haven't, but that might just be lack of opportunity. Aaaaanyone ever see this type of Indo give birth?

(this is the male that everted a hemipene on me)

Hes a tank to,nice looking indo,shows just because they are fat looking they arent nessacarilly gravid,especially if they evert hemipenes on you,lol

Looking forward to see how your gigas varieties have developed and the tannies,love the tannies

My classic male is nowhere near as heavy-bodied as that one! It almost looks like a centralian with a gigas paint job and a long, skinny tail.

Richard.C wrote:With imports,its probably because males wander more so are come accross more often

This theory is what I stand by.. considering there are females coming out of CBB babies no problem, it would be the only logical reason behind the "male influenced" gigas that are 99% WC.

Well in nature males are usually found alot more,later in the season though more females are found,males early in search of females then food,later females in search of food to bulk up for future litters ect and food to help with babies they may contain

Early in the season though is probably the most common time to find alot in small areas,also when u see most roadkills

With the supply and demand, exporters are quick to grab the ones that come out first; in turn are the males searching for females to mate with.. then after all the males have been collected, the demand is lower, leaving room for the females to have a less of a chance of being collected.

That is my theory, and pretty much the only logical theory.. not being they are "gigas".. because during the meiosis stage, it is literally a 50/50 odd between male and female, besides the temperature-dependent sex determinative reptiles, which is a completely different story.