Male or Female? & caging question.

[ben6]

Hi all, can anyone confirm my suspicion that the eastern with the less patterning in the pic is a male & the other is Female??

Also, is a 1.2Lx1.2Wx0.6H (meters) cage suitable to house 2 female adult eastern blues (outdoor enclosure, all year round)?



Regards
Ben

[ben6]

Hi, if ppl cannot answer the sexing question, can i please get some input on keeping the 2 females in the cage together?

[JoshChimera]

Beautiful pattern on your bts, Richard C should be chiming in soon.

[Dood]

My one Northern hybrid is in a cage half that size (48 x 48 x 24 for those not familiar with metric:) ) so they might get along with plenty of hiding spots but personally I would not house two BTS in that size of cage

[alichamp]

Why do you want to house them together? I am a total newbie (have had one baby blotchie for all of 3 weeks!) but I gather from reading the website and other threads that blue tongues are best kept in separate enclosures to be safe because they can fight, except for when they are in very large outdoor enclosures or by ppl very experienced.

Check out http://bluetongueskinks.net/care.htm#cohabitation

But I know there are experienced people out there who do keep BTS together so hopefully they will post.

[ben6]

Its definitely getting some mixed response from other sites, some say its ok as long as they get along and don't fight, others say its to small etc...

The reason why i want to house them together is to not have cages everywhere over the backyard, for some reason i thought in my head (before building the cage) that 1200x1200 would be a pretty decent sized cage for 2 eastern blues... it wasn't until i had it constructed that i thought, hmmm this is smaller than i was anticipating. so i have come to ask the question is it a decent size for 2 easterns.

I may end up building a new one, making it around the 1.8 to 2.0m mark. or just build a bunch of smaller ones and house individually.



Regards
Ben

[NickBrahz]

The thing is they can get along perfectly for weeks, months even years but all it takes is them to have a cranky mood and within minutes they can seriously injure or kill each other, blue tongues don't like to be housed with others they only tolerate it, in the wild they are solitary creatures that only pair up for mating. to me personally the risk no matter how unlikely is not worth it.

[ben6]

I definitely do not want any harm to come to any of them, i might place a divider down the middle and have individual sections of 1200x600mm... that way its still the 1 cage design, but the blues are separated.

actually i will do that.



Regards
Ben