sandfish skink

Question
how can i tell if my sandfish skink is male or female? thank you

Answer
Hi Reniejun,

The short answer is that you really can't tell with any certainty. Skinks in general are frequently very difficult to sex. This is true even with commonly kept species such as Blue tongues and Berber's skinks. There are sometimes some subtle differences in head width and tail thickness between the genders but this is not reliable and really only useful if you have a group of animals that you can compare to each other. Some keepers even resort to placing animals together briefly to view their behaviour to each other. Males skinks are usually very aggressive to other males and this can be used to to try to figure out the sexes.
There has also been very little successful captive breeding with sandfish Successful breeding really helps to add to our knowledge of how the two genders look.

I had a single sandfish for many years which had a rather wide tail base (the area of the tail just past the vent/opening) which made me think he was a he but I was never certain for all those years that I owned "him".
Their unique behaviour of quickly tunneling in and out of the sand makes them interesting pets although I must admit that his enclosure looked like an empty tank of sand most of the time. They are definitely not the best "display" animals.