Here is your blue things in nature fact of the day. I adore lizards, but Ohio only has a handful of species that I rarely even see. One of them is the five-lined skink. The young ones have a bright blue tail. Predators are more likely to go for the tail, which is expendable. They can regrow it. Interestingly, while at a reptile conference, a herpetologist who was leading a walk told us that the blue tails also serve to signal to adults that these are youngsters. Adult five-lined skinks can be agressive to each other. An experiment was done where young skinks were put in cages with adults. They were left alone even if they crawled on the adults. Non-toxic paint was then applied to their tails to temporarily turn them brown. The same lizards were then treated like adults and the true adults displayed agression towards them. #blue #lizards #natureclub #fivelinedskinks

Posted by Mel Grosvenor at 2021-04-16 14:34:22 UTC