In hatching them, but I can only offer my experience. To be kinda buried is not what varanids do. If allowed they are SO buried you cannot find them. Ask RSG about finding eggs. hahahahahahaha those were some fun days.

To carry it even further. The females have a magical sense of knowledge when it comes to knowing if the right temps and humidity is available. They do not have to dig to find out, they know it from the surface.

A common nesting senerio for a female monitors is. To begin building a nest, copulate. Yes, building the nest first. Then work on the nest a little here, a little there. In between burying only the entrance. Then right before laying reopen the burrows and "go down". They stay down for anywhere from 3hours(larger monitors) to overnight, to several days. They come up and hide all entrances, even burrows that were not the nesting burrow. This frantic hiding or protection of the nest is a give away that a complete nesting has taken place. A complete nesting is, all good eggs in one chamber, they are full and white. Normally these eggs hatch with ease in a wide variety of temps, humidities and substrates. They are not hard to hatch at all.

Eggs that vary from that, partially laid in a nest, a shallow nest, on the ground, etc. Normally result in being hard to hatch, low hatch rate, die at the least little thing. Heck, I have had eggs vary forty degrees F (in one day)and still hatch.

Yet others seem to have problems even if the temps vary a degree or a couple humidity points.

There is only a simple point here, if your really interested in hatching the eggs, you may consider better nesting. I cannot tell you how, as I have no idea of what kind of monitor your talking about.

Lastly, your past results are a perfect discription of poor nesting. Good looking eggs that fail to hatch.

If I get poor nesting, I have the very same results. Also consider, even if you know the exact nesting a female perfers, you still have to have it in the right condition at the right time. So to consistantly recieve eggs that hatch is about proper nest maintenance. You can fail at any time. Cheers

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