Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Has anyone had any experience of breeding Berber or Schneider's skinks? I have searched and searched, but can find hardly any info on them.

We have a 1.3 breeding group......two of the females are obviously gravid, I think the 3rd is too young as the male doesn't seem very interested in her.

It's been around 6 weeks since I saw them mating (I suspect one was gravid before this though) and although I have 3 nesting boxes in the viv, no eggs have been produced.

The only info I could find was quite basic and said that gestation was about 5 weeks, but although one of the 'girls' looks fit to bust, she obviously isn't ready to lay.

I'm about to take her to the vet, but was wondering if anyone bred these cute little chaps.

I found this: http://netti.nic.fi/~millah/berber.htm - at least good for incubation information.

The key to breeding (anything) is mimicking the natural environment as closely as possible. What is your cage set-up like?

Many gecko species will lay eggs at plant roots - this might be something worth trying for these lizards. Move your gravid female into an enclosure with as wide a range of environments as you can give her.

I got eggs once and she laid them in the water bowl, so they do need a damp environment, but may not recognize egg boxes.

Try using a wide potted succulent and keep the soil moist. Keep an area of the sand wet by running a tube (you can get aquarium tubing) down into the sand and pour water into it.

Use one of those resin "hide caves", but put it over a bunch of wet sand and soil mix and make it so she'll have to dig down into it a bit from the opening.

Again - since there's no literature on exactly where these lizards lay their eggs in the wild - give her a lot of options.