Endangered
Whitaker's skink
Oligosoma whitakeri
Whitaker's skink, also called Whitaker’s skink, is a skink in the family Scincidae — Oligosoma whitakeri, recorded as Endangered and tied to New Zealand.
The skink
Whitaker's skink, also called Whitaker’s skink, is a skink in the family Scincidae — Oligosoma whitakeri.
Range and habitat
Whitaker's skink lives in coastal forest and scrub. O. Whitakeri is found on two small, predator-free islands off the Coromandel Peninsula – Middle Island in the Mercury Islands group, and Castle Island. There is also a mainland population in a small rocky area at the base of coastal hills at Pukerua Bay, near Wellington.
GBIF currently lists 18 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Most skinks forage in leaf litter or under cover. Burrowing species slip through sand or soil more than they climb.
In crisis
As of August 2021 the Department of Conservation (DOC) classified Whitaker's skink as Nationally Endangered under the New Zealand Threat Classification System.
Whitaker's skink is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Whitaker's skink, Wikidata item Q3350597 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
