Exotic Pets - Blue-Tongue Skink - as part of the series on pets and animals by GeoBeats.

What we have here are Blue-Tongued Skinks. They come from Australia, New Guinea area. I have got the sizes here to show you. This is a baby. This is an adult. This is pretty much as big as they get. When you start out handling these, they do not mind being held, but they prefer to be looked at more than held. The size of the tank that you get for them, you always want to start out with, like I said, the largest tank you can get so that you do not have to keep switching sizes for them. You can start out with a 20 with a small guy like this, but you need to go bigger as they get large. There are plenty of different color variations of these guys that you can get and they are called Blue-Tongue Skinks because their tongue is blue, and in nature bright colors usually mean ‘I am poisonous,’ or ‘I will make you really sick. Do not bother me.’

So whenever they are threatened or attacked, one of the first things they do besides try to crawl away is they start flashing that blue tongue, and when they flash that tongue, they are hoping that the predator that is trying to eat them, knows that bright colors ‘I picked something up like that before and it did not taste good or it made me sick,’ and they leave them alone, but they will flip that tongue more and more, the more threatened they feel, to ward off a predator. They also have very good personalities. I could stand here all day and hold both these guys, and they are just going to hang out.