# Are blue tongues active in winter



## Reg casey (May 17, 2018)

Hello everyone i have had my blue tongue juvenile for 3 weeks and hes only come out of hiding twice when ive been home...generally hes burrowed under his substrate in his hide on the warm side.. is this normal considering winter is here in Victoria?


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## Sdaji (May 17, 2018)

I've seen wild blue-tongueds in Melbourne active in the middle of winter and also in sheltered sites such as under large logs in the shade where even during the middle of the day they remain too cold to move for 2 months or more. In captivity, they'll largely respond to the conditions you give them, but some will choose to try to hibernate while others will try to remain active and feed if given conditions which allow it. If you keep juveniles warm they'll usually prefer to keep feeding and growing. Difficult to comment on yours without knowing what environment you're giving it.


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## Reg casey (May 18, 2018)

His warm side is 28 degrees during the day and around 18 to 21 overnight... he has a cool side with a hide also but never uses it..i have 2 hides one he can climb.. a hollowed out log and 2 plants in his enclosure


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## Sdaji (May 18, 2018)

If it's just 28 degrees ambient using blue globes, or you have floor heat which gets up to 28 degrees or something, it's not enough for him to get as warm as he'd like. Even in the middle of winter in Melbourne, if it's a sunny day a Blue-tongued will have no problem heating up to 40 degrees if it wants to. Play around with an infrared thermometer on a day where the maximum temperature is around 14-18 degrees but there is full sun and not too much wind. In the early afternoon you'll find many places where the temperature exceeds 40 degrees. Blue-tongued lizards are active during the day and love full sun when it's cool. This is why you can find them active with warm bodies over 30 degrees on a 14 degree day.


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## Reg casey (May 18, 2018)

Ok thanks for the advice my heat globe is an infrared which is set to 28 degrees.. However the pet shop that i bought him from told me to lower the daytime temp down to 24 with a couple of degrees gradience... what do u think


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## Sdaji (May 18, 2018)

I'd get rid of the infrared globe (no idea why anyone ever wants to use those ridiculous things!) and replace it with a visible light spotlight. They're much cheaper and better for a blue-tongued. The sun produces light, that's what is natural and what a blue-tongued will respond best to. It's a cue saying this is a good place to bask and get warm.

I think 24 degrees is stupid, unless you're trying to force the lizard to hibernate, which I personally wouldn't do with a juvenile. It may be a strategy some people would use for adults for a short period in the middle of winter (winter hasn't started yet, and the dead middle of winter isn't for about two months).

I personally would still give him a basking spot of over 32 degrees. For a juvenile I wouldn't bother trying to provide a winter in his first year (other people would, that's personal preference and you may choose to). If anything, I would personally only give maybe 2-3 weeks of simulated winter, in July. If you do want him to stay active, feeding and growing through winter, you'll need to give him the temperature required to do that.

I'm not personally an advocate of copying nature as closely as possible (the vast majority of wild reptiles die before 1 year of age, have scars, parasites, very rarely live to old age, etc... I really think we should be aiming to do much better than nature!) but for a beginner keeper with a blue-tongued lizard, some aspects of nature are worth considering. When it's cold at night, they just go to sleep, they aren't metabolising much so the temperature isn't too important during those hours where it's too cold, as long as you're not silly about it. If you want him to be active and feed he'll need an opportunity to get above 30 degrees, preferably 35-40 degrees in a basking spot provided by a spotlight. In nature, if they want to warm up, they go sit in a sunny spot. At this time of year, the air is cold, but the sun and the rock/log/ground they are on is hot, heated by the sun which puts out visible light. The best way to simulate that is to provide a spotlight, and you don't usually need to provide any other heating. He'll heat up in the basking spot then when he is warm enough he'll run around foraging for feed and exploring. He may or may not understand a dark infrared heat source, or use floor heat (you won't find magical heated patches of ground in the shade in Melbourne, or anywhere without active volcanoes etc). If your plan is to keep him active through winter, give at least 8-10 hours of basking light per day where he can easily get above 30 degrees, preferably more. It's pretty easy to do this, just arrange the enclosure so a rock or log is close enough to the spotlight (experiment using an infrared thermometer to see how hot the rock gets). To give you an idea, when I was breeding small monitors I used a 40-60W spotlight to provide a basking spot of 70-80 degrees, which the lizards loved and used every day. Blue-tongueds aren't quite as extreme but I'd personally give them at least a 40 degree basking spot, along with a fairly cool ambient temperature, and depending on the temperature of the room etc, little to no floor heat (with most snakes I love floor heat, but for some such as Tigers, Red-bellieds, Copperheads and other southern, diurnal, cold-adapted snakes which have fairly similar thermal habits to Blue-tongueds, ideally I'd do the same).

Basically, in south eastern Australia these lizards are either giving up and going into deep hibernation, or they work as hard as they possibly can for most of the year to get as hot as possible, and ideally they want a body temperature of somewhere around 30/low 30s, and since the air temperature is below that most of the time, they need to find basking spots much higher than their preferred temperature to get to their preferred temperature. If the opportunity to get warm enough doesn't exist, they usually won't risk their lives trying (a lizard out in the open too cold to move properly is very easy prey!) so they will just crawl under a big log and wait for warmer weather.


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## dragonlover1 (May 20, 2018)

I agree 100% with Sdaji ,get rid of the useless infrared and get a lamp that resembles the sun :- a bright white light.Some people say reptiles can't see red light but it has been proven they can and keeps them awake at night.Can you sleep with a light on ?
I would also suggest a UV lamp,I know some people say they don't need it but my reasoning is when they bask in the sun they also get UV so all my reptiles have a UV lamp as well as a heat lamp, even my pythons.


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## Flaviemys purvisi (May 20, 2018)

dragonlover1 said:


> I agree 100% with Sdaji ,get rid of the useless infrared and get a lamp that resembles the sun :- a bright white light.Some people say reptiles can't see red light but it has been proven they can and keeps them awake at night.Can you sleep with a light on ?
> I would also suggest a UV lamp,I know some people say they don't need it but my reasoning is when they bask in the sun they also get UV so all my reptiles have a UV lamp as well as a heat lamp, even my pythons.


Yeah turtles can definitely see those infra red lamps no worries at all.


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