Lazy lizard perfect pet for couch potato.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

A blue tongue skink does not sound like a creature most people would want to invite into their homes, but Zach Griffith has seven of the slithery lizards living in his two-bedroom Eugene apartment, and, he says, they're the perfect house guests.

"They're a great first pet. Their care requirements are practically nothing," Griffith says. "They're so big and lazy, they'll lay on your chest and watch TV with you."

Griffith, 23, isn't just a blue tongue fan: he's the founder of Bluetongueskinks.net, probably the only Web site in the world that's exclusively devoted to these unusual creatures, which are native primarily to Australia and also Indonesia. Roughly the length of a loaf of bread and the diameter of a monster burrito, blue tongues have tiny lizard legs, a snake-like body and lidded eyes which, skink owners insist, are downright human.

"They have these eyeballs," Griffith says. "You can see them looking at you."

And then there's that unmistakeable tongue, a shocking cobalt exclamation point that scares away predators and makes humans remember the time they ate one too many popsicles and their mouth turned funny colors.

"It's not forked like a snake tongue," says Griffith's fiancee Holly Humphrey, who admits she had little interest in skinks, blue tongued or otherwise, when Griffith brought home an Irian Jaya Indonesian variety several years ago.

"At first I didn't even want to touch them, but now I just love them," she says.

It would be a stretch to say that blue tongue skinks are taking the reptile world by storm, but what Griffith calls "the blue-tongue bug" does appear to be spreading.

Years ago, when he first started his Web site, he says Bluetongueskinks .net was a veritable online ghost town. Now, the site boasts hundreds of registered users who log on to read detailed care sheets, browse reptile classifieds and purchase personalized skink Frisbees and T-shirts.

Sporting a polo shirt and cropped hair, Griffith may look like your average college student, but he's a walking lizard encyclopedia, who can tell you, for instance, that the rare pygmy blue tongue was thought to be exctinct until 1992, when one was found in the stomach of a road-kill snake near Adelaide, Australia. His Web site is packed with similar information; and there are pages upon pages of photos, videos, artwork, music, trivia and lizard games.

"(The Web site) provides very accurate information. It's very thorough," says Edward Martinez, a lawyer from Mesa, Ariz., who owns eight blue tongue skinks including an extemely rare Western variety.

For many, including Kelly McKinney, a medical claims processor from Indianappolis who recently joined the blue-tongue cult, the highlight of the site is the online forum, a place for owners to come together, post questions, swap photos and share tips such as "how to sex a Shingle Back blue tongue."

McKinney, who also owns 10 snakes and two other lizards, says unlike other more common pet store reptiles, blue tongues have personality.

"They're very intelligent lizards," she says. "They react to different sounds. It's kind of like a dog but with scales."

Because of its relative obscurity, the Internet is still the best place to buy blue tongue skinks, and shoppers are warned to look for captive-bred skinks because the wild ones are often unfriendly and riddled with parasites. Most sell for about $125, but rarer varieties can go for thousands of dollars, Griffith says.

Blue tongues give birth to live young and can only produce five to 15 offspring a year, which might be one reason they aren't better known. The more common bearded dragon, for instance, produces clutches of eggs and can have twice as many young, every few months.

Still, blue tongues do appear to be gaining new admirers. The reptiles have a life span of about 20 years and they are omnivores that can eat everything from cat food to collard greens to live mice.

Griffith feeds his seven skinks - Slurpy, Sassy, Enzo, Eugene, Tarzan, TQ and Kool Moe Dee - papayas, figs and rasberries, and keeps them in individual tanks (they don't mix well together) where they live beneath a heat lamp amid aspen shavings. Slurpy, one of the oldest in the bunch, is sometimes allowed to roam the apartment, which has been fully "skink-proofed."

When he isn't tending to his Web site or his lizards, Griffith can be found attending classes at Lane Community College. He plans to study business at the University of Oregon and hopes to go into real estate.

He and Humphrey, both Eugene natives, were high school sweethearts at Sheldon.

Griffith and Humphrey say they hope to someday own some of the rarer varieties of blue tongues, including the bright orange Centralian. And even though there are some 1,100 different species of skinks, including one that lives in British Columbia, the couple has no interest in owning any other kind of lizard.

"I'm sticking with blue tongues," Griffith says.

CAPTION(S):

Zach Griffith holds one of seven blue tongue skinks that he keeps in his Eugene apartment. "They have these eyeballs. You can see them looking at you." - ZACH GRIFFITH Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Kool Moe Dee, one of Zach Griffith's skinks, keeps warm under a sunlamp.