It's just a magazine article, rather than a paper, written by someone who didn't seem to be overly familiar with lace monitors and had consequently gleaned the information from elsewhere to write the article. Aside from his direct observations, that is. The photos alone tell as much or more than the article. He was fortunate enough to have all of that happen right behind his house, which is how quite a number of lacie nestings in termite mounds get observed. Otherwise it's a matter of visiting the same mound daily for several weeks, which is tricky if one has a life.
Not that I haven't tried. I often visit friends that live on the south coast and they have a lot of lace monitors on their property, as well as termite mounds. Two years ago I found four really fresh nest digs, all of which had been excavated two days before I arrived, at most. Last year I decided to head down there at the same time of year, but a week earlier. I also drove, rather than flew, so I could really load up with camera gear (video camera and tripod, as well as still camera). From the day I arrived until the day I left I did the rounds of several known termite mounds that had been nested in previously. Unfortunately, as many people in NSW can attest, we are having a horrible summer this year, weatherwise, and there was absolutely no activity on any of the mounds. It's quite possible that most of the females may even skip a season. I did find one fresh nest, off the property, and it is one of the photographs I included in another post in this thread.
I do have a few photographs of this female heath monitor (Varanus rosenbergi) surprised while digging her nest, though. I am very familiar with this female as I've seen her nests several years in a row and have found her on the mound itself on a couple of occasions. Gravid female
She hangs around the mound for two to three weeks after laying, too. It's just a matter of knowing where to look for her. I've never seen her anywhere near the mound at any other time.
Fabrizio:Has your female laid in the substrate before? It'll be cool if you had a chart of your female's laying habits that you could show us.
She's never laid in the substrate. There's always been deep substrate available, but the most she's ever done is a few cursory digs at the start of the cycle (or messing around after laying).
Strangely, I do have a chart showing timelines for everything (start of cycle, start and end of mating, ovulation, egg laying) but it would be way too complex to post on here as an image. I use it when I'm giving talks on reproduction in monitors.
What's more informative is calculating the average timelines for all of the stages of the reproductive cycle, for they're pretty consistent. If I managed to catch her ovulating I can predict her laying date to within a couple of days - something I've demonstrated a number of times on another forum on which I usually post.
That's how I know when to set up my camera to do time lapse of her laying while I'm away at work (I don't know how to embed videos into the text, so the video may appear randomly below).
When I've compared notes with other breeders here, there's have been really consistent with mine as well. Even the perenties at my old workplace, which are an entirely unrelated species, showed near identical timelines for events. Aside from nesting, which was very different from lace monitors (perenties are ground nesters), breeding them was nearly identical in practice.
