Whomever said that may be about six months off. I have experience with several of the species you mention, and generally they do reproduce within 18 months of age.
Now heres another broadbased statement. This site, makes lots and lots of goofy errors in thinking about husbandry. For instance, many here say, their conditions are ideal or perfect. In my opinion, there is no such animal. What is ideal or perfect is results. Of course that is subjective and only important to the individual keeper and is always temporary(for the moment)
Another problem with husbandry is, its driven by people and we make fatal mistakes, again an example. I have hatched and raised beautiful individual monitors, only to make a stupid mistake and kill them dead. In this case, you can say the husbandry was great, as this monitor grew and was a picture of health. But the keeper(me) is actually the husbandry and I killed it. So the husbandry sucked. This is very common with keepers on this site.
The reason I mention the above is, HUSBANDRY, controls what the captive animals do, not the animals themselves. That goes for all of us, good or not so good.
Monitors as species and individuals have a reproductive potential. What that is exactly, is unknown. But.
They have a potential to reproduce normally in under 18 months. IF your going to take this out of context and make it an exact statement. Some have proven to do so. Others still need to be tested. That statement can be interpided in at least two ways. One is, some of the species you mentioned have do so. Or some individuals of some of the species have done so.
By the way, you may want to include KD's on that list. As I visited a zoo that had one year old females, and they said, they were producing ovum already. (To me, that means they are ready)How they knew that, I do not know, its simply what they told me. They also mentioned that the females were too small to reproduce. I wonder how they knew that too.
As to why its not being done by lots of people is very funny and odd to me. In business, you look for a model when trying to accomplish something. With some things there are models and with some there are no models. With breeding monitors, a model exsists. Its as simple as following it. Why more people don't is sort of magic.
About that mentality. There have been a million or so, Savs imported in the past four or five years. Why aren't they being commonly bred? That thought is very funny to me. I believe, if you dispersed that many monitors, without instruction, a huge percentage would die, and a decent percentage would produce.(just numbers) But they are not. That to me means the general widespread husbandry(understanding) is actively stopping them from reaching events normal to them. Reproduction IS normal to them.
In my opinion, if you want to see successful normal life events, then you should follow successful models. But sadly, that is being fought tooth and claw. People want to tell monitors what to do, not ask them. That indeed is a problem. People here think you have to do something to allow life events, in reality, its not true, you simply need to get your butt out of the way and let them do what they have been doing for millions of years. Its as simple as, give whats beneficial and remove whats not. In most cases, that would include removing us.
Lastly, instruction is givin on this forum by people who keep and breed monitors(in many levels) By people who have never ever done either, to people who have bred them but never hatched an egg, to people thinking their experts because they have a producing female. To people who have totally failed in keeping monitors but give advice as if they were experts in successful life events. To people who judge literature and spout it as if it was experience. The problem is, your responsible for who you listen too and taking it in proper context. Remember the forumites are expert at "out of context". Good day F
