Hi, I agree, its all about you and not about hibernating or not. ITs your patterns. This is the next step in advancing your husbandry, you know, discovering your part in the equation.

What it sound like to me is, you wear out by fall and you take less care then in spring after you had a vacation(winter). If that is what you want, then great, stay doing that.

But if you want to find out the potential of your animals, then you have to figure out what is important and what is not important, and using that information.

For instance, spring is the time for reproduction because reptiles are be active and conserve energy. By mid to late summer, they no longer can conserve energy because its too hot, 24/7. By fall, they can again build up reserves because they now have the ability to conserve.

If you gave them that ability 24/7, 365, you may see different more benefitual results. But you will have to adjust your behavior, you know, you will have to adjust your feeding schedule, to maintain a spring like approach.

I have done that with many many reptiles and had extreme success with all. A few examples are with ackies, we just have a female lay 18 clutches in a row. Which beat our previous record of 14 by a Kings monitor. Also, I have a female gouldi cross that has laid 59 clutches in her life(I hatched her) and she is still going. She will be nine years old. We have seen many other very good results as well, a female lacie producing five clutches in one year. A gouldi producing ten clutche a year for two years(she lived and produced for many more years, but not at that rate)

Two years ago we triple clutched a L.thayeri, etc.

There are two distint areas of concern, one the species reproductive potential and your pattern of husbandry. IF you change one, YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE OTHER.

You simply cannot not hibernate them, then not change your other husbandry.

So yes, I totally agree with Shvar, and I agree with you. That is, I agree with your results. But you may have failed to adjust your husbandry to meet the new demands of your non-hibernated reptiles.

As I state, its all about support. I fully understand that, as I thought ackies could only have 6 clutches a year. Until I changed how I supported them.

Support also means learning their optimum conditions, for instance, most in the monitor world thinks gestation times are normally a month or more. Yet, we have monitors laying eggs every two weeks. Clutch after clutch. And larger monitors, dropping clutches 8 to 10 days after copulation.

The point is, it took time and a lot of work to figure out what it took to do those things. To be truthfull, my first events were luck. But I worked until I could reproduce those results.

One key was the understanding that reproduction does not negatively effect the health of a female. I do lots of field work and in most cases, reproduction has no effect. But in captivity reproduction can be very hard on females, causing them to lose weight and become dehydrated. Yet, healthy wild females do not become dehydrated or lose weight.

The point is, once you learn how to not harm the females, they can support reproducing on a continious basis. And yes, that is a lot of work to keep up with.

So maybe its better you hibernate your animals, so you do not have to work that long and that hard. You see, its really about you.

I see you like you use out of context information to back your theories, which is fine. But its not needed, as I can show exact context data that monitors do not need to be hibernated, and they grow better and produce more. And lastly they still live very very long lives. So yes, you can choose a method that fits you.

This year, I am allowing a bunch of monitors to go down, as I am very busy doing other things. And I really do not need all them babies running around. You see, its a choice. Cheers

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