As you may know, we have monitors with access to natural lite. If they have a choice of basking lites or the sun, they always choose litebulbs over the sun. We have outdoor cages with both.

Also of interest, monitors seem to be almost blind in bright sun(midday sun here), they can pick out movement, but not objects. When Jefe and Rsg came over, I would show them. They cannot tell the difference between a shadow and a mouse. Inside and with low litor litebulbs, they know the difference.

On another note. I often bring this up when having this conversation. Most snakes here, and snakes and monitors in the hotter areas of the world, go down into very deep burrows/holes/crevices. They go into areas of constant dark and constant temps. With this in mind, how do they know its day or night? They do.

They not only know its day or night, they know the weather conditions. If its cloudy or raining. They know this from places they cannot see out.

For instance, once we dug up an ackie. Its burrow was over a meter deep and three meters long. It went thru roots and boulders and back and forth. Consider this is a small monitor, what do larger monitors do?

While they spend time close to the surface, they also spend time deep deep in burrows.

Don't ask me how they know, they just know.

Which leads to the final point. Most including academics, get lost in the how they know something. Then working on, what they are doing. What confuses many, including academics, is I do not care how they actually do something, I care about what they do and the timing and sequence of what they do.

Again consider, how they do something is of great interest to science, for many reasons. But of little use with husbandry, what they do is of prime importance. What they do is behavior, a very weak area in science. Cheers

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