[6] Members of the North New Zealand herpetofauna have faced range declines due to mammalian predation and colonisation.

To avoid water loss and maximise survival chances the skinks, spend the day in thick leaf litter, hide under rocks and find refuge in seabird burrows, such behaviour is both innate and learned.

[5] The New Zealand skink fauna is incredibly diverse, coming from a monophyletic lineage to many species with varying morphologies.

Some individuals are seen to have black and white markings above shoulders with ventral areas of the body showing vivid reddish pink colouring.

[11] Hence the evolution of camouflage patterning features allowing this species to be cryptic and avoid identification as food by predators.

[8] This behaviour is common among skink species as a mate selection strategy, to assess the relative quality of the female.

[8] Such behaviour is a widespread adaption among lizards in cool climates to enhance vitellogenesis and reduce gestation length by providing better thermal conditions for developing embryos.

The fast sprint speed of the robust skink is also linked to prey capture, social interactions, territory defence and reproduction.

[18] Differences in sprint speed could be due to increase in size of adults, or reflect a variation in selection pressures.

[21] Such behaviour is a form of background matching to the leaf litter habitat, making object detection difficult for predatory species.

[5] Robust skinks are omnivores, feeding primarily as insectivores on a wide range of invertebrates such as insects, crustaceans and molluscs.

These translocations intended to create additional populations of the threatened robust skink community which may well have occurred there before Pacific rats (Rattus exulans) arrived.