I'm going to agree with murrindindi here in that I, too, think you're missing something if you think varanids are 'just like any other reptile'.

For starters, lets look at their high metabolic rate. Most monitor species have an optimum body temperature, the temperature they try to attain when they're hunting or digesting food, of around 36C, which is very close to a human's optimum body temperature (maintained internally rather than via basking) of around 37C and much higher than that of most other reptiles. The significance of this is that monitors are much more active than other reptiles and if you watch big monitors like lace monitors or Varanus panoptes out in the wild they spend a lot of time on the move. Studies done on many of the larger species show that their lungs have a surface area capable of sustaining quite athletic activity levels.

In Australasia, monitors are the top native predator in many environments. There are few native mammalian predators here in the small to medium size range, so monitors often fill the small to medium sized predator niche instead. There's an excellent paper about this by Sweet and Pianka. Recently I did a tally of the number of mammalian predators in the part of Canada in which I grew up and there were ten members of the weasel clan alone (the number of small to medium predators is huge when one starts adding raccoons, cats and foxes). Here most of those niches are filled by monitors.

They are also more intelligent than other reptiles, with the possible exception of crocodilians (it's hard to compare the two, for crocodilians are ambush predators and don't show the immediate reactions that monitors do, but they do learn well). It's quite easy to train monitors to do things if you try. As long as there's a reward in it for them, they learn incredibly quickly for a reptile. Too quickly, in some cases, for I could write an essay on the number of times I've had to change the feeding routine of my monitors at home so that I don't inadvertently trigger a feeding response in my male lace monitor.

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