A few posts back you say"
"So where else might we look for expertise on the biology and behavior of wild monitors? In Australia, why don't we ask Aboriginal people – for around 50,000 years their survival depended on being skilled field herpers, among other things, and goannas have always been highly prized as a source of fats in an otherwise very lean environment. Aboriginal people, in short, know how to find goannas. They understand very well how to predict concentrations at food sources, or where nesting areas are a limited resource, but at other times of the year they must go looking for them. Do they know about FR's "bonded pairs", about "hubs", about any of that stuff? Nah. If you go out with Aboriginal women who are hunting goannas, or simply drive around with Aboriginal people who never miss a trick when it comes to spotting some good tucker, what you see is pretty much what the biologists see. Having done this, I can report that Aboriginal people find no more goannas than would a similar number of experienced field herpers, and we are not coming up with animals in pairs or in groups out in the bush. It frankly has never occurred to me to ask, but I have a strong suspicion that statements like FR makes would get some response like "why he makin' humbug, nothing to that humbug talk.""
Yet on December 4 on varanus.net you say:
"There is apparently a quite different situation in the vicinity of floodplains. Here, usually in woodlands within a few hundred yards of the floodplain margin, there can be relatively small areas (say, a quarter-acre or less) where there may be several dozen burrow entrances, some crowded together, others scattered, where a number of panoptes congregate and apparently spend most of the late dry season. These are post-nesting aggregations, and as far as I know involve mostly females. I have not heard of large animals that would almost surely be males being part of this.
These warrens tend to be in gaps in the woodland, but have no other obvious landscape features other than relatively deep sandy soil; there are many clearings with what appears to be similar soil, but no warren. These are long-term locations, many of them known to local aboriginal people, and some have names. Both bushies and aboriginal people say that this or that warren "has always been here", indicating persistence over several decades at least.
The same people (and some biologists, but I have not seen this myself) say that the goannas are sometimes out in numbers, and that individuals can be very close together. You get various answers when you ask if they fight or chase one another around. It is also not clear if each animal has a burrow (in part because in the denser areas the burrows may intersect).
It has been difficult to do much work with these warrens because their locations are known, and aboriginal people exploit them very heavily. Aboriginal people I've talked to say that they do not find any eggs while digging up the animals, and that the warrens are "girl galawan [panoptes] place, no man galawan here."
I am now very confused, which is the truth. If there are indeed congregations of "girl galawan" and no "man galawan" uh I dont think its for breeding.
Jefe
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Gone Goannas
Varanus.net
