Seamus i need your opinion

[raiquee]

I have a black rough monitor, a little over a year now and about 2-2 1/2 feet.

I need a good website, or good info on them basically. I have read serveral times they reach 4 feet. Or they reach 6 feet. Is it a range between that? One or the other?

Also, when i got her she ate crickets, roaches and other small insects on a regular basis, being supplemented with rodents. Now she refuses all insects and will only take rodents. Any idea what i can do to spark her intrest in it again?

I know BRN's have frail muzzles so they shouldn't be offered large prey items, nor a lot of prey items, but that is all she is eating right now.

We want to feed her a very healthy diet that will make her explode in growth.

What are your opinions? You seem to have the best monitor experiance on this board.

Thank you.

[Seamus Haley]

I need a good website, or good info on them basically.

Offhand I don't actually know of a really solid roughneck website that I would trust enough to reccomend... I'll look for a few when I have a couple moments and see if I can find some that I'd trust. I'm sure they exist, I just don't have any bookmarked and the general monitor sites I do have bookmarked pretty much just list nomenclature and a little range information so aren't of a lot of direct use.

I have read serveral times they reach 4 feet. Or they reach 6 feet. Is it a range between that? One or the other?

I think you'll get a lot of variance from different sources depending on the number and origin of specimins any individual author has worked with and how they're measuring the animal. Snout to vent even huge adults will generally fall well under the two foot mark but arboreal Varanids have got pretty good sized tails, three fifths to about two thirds of the length will be tail... As much as the roughnecks have a little more girth to it than a lot of the other arboreal species from around the same range, most of the individuals I have worked with (Not all *that* many, probably under a hundred animals and most of them were subadults) were missing pieces of the tail. Because it tapers though, it's kind of tough to judge how much might be missing proportional to the adult size of a grown animal. Er... Yeah so I have no doubt that some massive record setters were hitting six feet total length (the same way there are burms close to thirty or savs that five foot plus) but even older adults that I have worked with rarely exceeded four feet and in my experience the average was somewhere between about three and a half and four.

Also, when i got her she ate crickets, roaches and other small insects on a regular basis, being supplemented with rodents. Now she refuses all insects and will only take rodents. Any idea what i can do to spark her intrest in it again?

I know I rally a LOT for more varied diets in varanids when the issue comes up but it does need to be looked at on a species by species basis. Mammals are still going to be a fairly minor part of the diet of most monitors in the wild and care should be taken in what proportions are given... But for a species which spends as much time in trees as roughnecks do, they will get proportionally more than a solid terrestrial species... The diet for wild adults and subadults (according to everything I have read and all logic based on the local fauna in their natural range) is going to have a few more mammals and birds, a lot more herps and a few less inverts than the diet for a lot of more common pet species... I'd still aim for about 40-50% inverts (tomato horn worms, lots of roaches, nightcrawlers if you can find any big enough to interest them mostly) with another 30%+ other herps (low toxin amphibians, feeder lizards and snakes) and then no more than thirty percent rodents, eggs or birds... But that's a lot more rodents than most monitors can take and flourish on so worth mentioning. As to how to get interest up... Start encouraging natural behaviors a bit if you can... cut back the food intake for a week or two, feed it but in smaller proportions and start offering prey in different ways and a wider variety. Monitors can be conditioned to accept food in a certain way, at a certain time, in a certain place really easily. Break the conditioning and it'll fire up some of the feeding behaviors more likely to allow you wider control over the diet. Mix up what and how much is offered as well... if it would normally take a couple pinks or fuzzies, cut the number or mass of the rodents being offered in half (or less), feed it and then feed it the additional prey items quickly afterwards. They won't starve themselves either... herps are generally pretty geared towards fasting between avaliable meals or seasonal prey avaliability altering the metabolic rates so... Just stop offering rodents for awhile and it'll eat what you want to give it.

What are your opinions? You seem to have the best monitor experiance on this board.

Pretty much as above on the opinions. I agree with your desire to vary the diet and I generally feel that good husbandry includes meeting the nutritional tendencies of wild individuals (if not exact prey species) so good deal there... This species is less prone to rodent related obesity than many others so it's not *quite* as much to worry about though... And while I thank you for the compliment, I'm positive there are lots of others who have at least as much monitor experience as I do and I know for a fact that there are users here who have a lot more, so I'm happy to help in any way I can but there are lots of people here who could easily do the same and more.

For books or people to look up for much more detailed information than I could ever provide... Mark Bayless is someone who I know has produced CB roughnecks so... Well, reproduction is a pretty good indicator of positive husbandry, especially in monitors. Bennet is hands down far and away without question one of the authors I'd personally trust above virtually anyone else. Frank Retes (without getting into any of the importation issues) has had great success with a lot of species and approaches husbandry a bit differently (rather than, this is what works in nature, let's mimic that he's got a lot of experience which does suggest that there's some merit to "This way works, nature can go hang.") although I have no idea what, if anything, he's done with roughnecks. The other users of this site are all great resources too, generally if something is opened up for discussion and hashed out, some consensus can be reached on virtually anything husbandry related.

[Seamus Haley]

Oh yeah and forgot to mention...

Assuming that the environmental conditions are all ideal, the right temps, the correct humidity, decent UV source and penetration, hides, climbing facilities and what have you... Sometimes tweaking the conditions a bit can help stimulate different activities in herps. Indonesian(ish) species go through some fairly major changes in the weather throughout the course of the year and a lot of these seasonal changes are accompanied by varying prey avaliability. Feeding instincts can frequently alter depending on the environmental conditions... we usually notice it the most in species which completely go off feed but it can be minor as well... at certain temperatures and humidities associated with a given time of year the feeding instincts can change and the animal can be more receptive to certain types of prey.

So if all else fails, seasonally cycling an animal will often re-trigger interest in prey items which are being ignored.