I walked into the lace monitor cage this morning as I do almost every morning and was attacked by the normally docile female! Fortunately, I have cat like reflexes (not) and was able to get out of her way. She's never done this to me in the past.
Also, she looked as if she had lost weight over night. In addition a large burrow that she had been digging for three days was now covered up completely.
Let's see...aggressive monitor weight loss covered burrow. What could this mean:
This borrow was impressive! My son is 7 years old and 50" tall and you can see him standing in it. I dug about three feet down and the burrow took a turn under the concrete slab. The eggs were three feet under ground and about 1 foot under the slab.
The surface temperature of the substrate was about 80F using a IR temp gun. Three feet below the surface the temp was about 77F. Under the cement slab the substarte temp was almost exactly 85F! Amazing that she dug for days until she found the perfect temperature.
I built a nest box as you can see in these pictures. The lid is off because I checked here for eggs first. She explored the box a few times but never did much digging. I believe that it was far too new for her to use as it had been in her enclosure for less than 1 week. Hopefully she uses it next time as I dug for two hours to get to these eggs! It was the best workout that I've had in months.
The entire time that I was digging the female was trying to get at me. I finally had to remove her. She's typically fairly docile but not today!
You can see by the pictures how much dirt I had to remove to get to the eggs. I'm beat.
Sorry that some of the pictures aren't very clear but I have 4 good looking eggs that are currently incubating in perlite at about 85F. I used about a 1 to 1 mix of water to perlite based on weight (slightly heavy on the water side). They're in a plastic container with a lid on it. I didn't poke any holes in the lid as the top doesn't appear to be air tight. Any suggestions on incubation would be greatly appreciated. This is how I incubated Cyclura eggs and it worked well but I'm a monitor rookie.
Special thanks to David (Crocdoc). He's always quick to respond to my questions over e-mail. I'm sure that I've asked him every rookie question in the book. His advice has been right on. It's refreshing to find people who are truly working for the good of these animals and are so willing to help others.
Well I have plenty of time to mess things up. I'd be thrilled to see these hatch.
