Seeing as how there hasn't been a good content-based dustup around here for a while, let's play 'Ask the Monitors'. Since some of you have said what you think before this was posted, I guess you-all shouldn't bother to respond.
The focus on the forums is necessarily on our captives, monitors in little boxes, but none of these captives is more than a plane ride or at best a few generations away from 'real' monitors in the wild.
Some time back I began posting about wild monitors, based on a couple of years of fieldwork with various smaller monitor species in northern Australia, and on the results of a much broader range of research on wild monitors as reported in the scientific literature. I also keep a few monitors, mostly to help me understand the quirks of species that I later intend to work with in the wild. A few people seem to think that information about wild monitors cannot contradict what they conclude from watching their captives, but this is missing the point. Here, I explain why I think so.
Both scientific research on free-living monitors and successful maintenance of monitors in captivity need to be based on "asking the monitors" what they do, or what they need. It is obvious that neither is going to work out if we attempt to "tell the monitors" what they do or what they need, by forcing our preconceptions on them. In the wild, you just end up being proved wrong, while in captivity your animals end up being sick or dead. It is essential to "ask the monitors", and those who urge that approach to keeping captives are correct. What other criterion could you use? People love to impose their ideas on nature, but the funny thing is that nature doesn't care what you think. If you think it's OK to keep a monitor in a screen-topped aquarium with a hot rock and feed it hot dogs and catfood, nature will give you the same answer every time, right?
These discussions degenerate immediately when information about wild monitors is brought in, because much of it is contradictory to experiences with captive animals. Most keepers have never seen a wild monitor, and fewer still have been able to work closely with wild monitors for long periods. You can see a bit on TV, but most of your ideas about monitors come from animals in boxes. Being put in a cage does not change the basic biology of a monitor, but many things are going to be highly artificial from then on. Captivity restricts the options, and it is important not to confuse what 'real' wild monitors choose to do with what captives will do, if in captivity the option to choose is elminated or restricted.
Unfortunately (perhaps), wild monitors are nothing like the animals most of us keep. When they are active they are acutely aware of events in their surroundings, which can easily mean within a half-mile radius. I have repeatedly seen monitors react to hawks a half mile away, or intently watch another 2' long monitor on a tree 80-100 yards away, one that I could see only with binoculars and even so only because the animal I was watching "told" me where it was. Wild monitors appear to know their home ranges in detail; after several days of visiting other females, I watched and followed a male V. glauerti make a beeline return of over 300 yards (over, under and through rock outcrops in dense monsoon forest) to the base of the tree where he had left a female. That female had left the tree days ago (I know, because she and other animals had radiotransmitters that allowed me to find them anytime I chose), and had gone to two other trees. As I watched, the male trailed her another 100 yards to the second tree, and then to the third where she was at the time. This whole process took about 45 minutes. The first part was done "from memory", and thereafter the female was located by tracking her scent.
Wild monitors are faster than you think possible. I have seen V. glebopalma run up a 60' vertical rockface and "get air" going over the rim; V. gouldii can overtake and catch flying finches; V. eremius are out of sight in the spinifex clumps before the sand they kicked up when you flushed them has fallen back down.
These are 'real' monitors, doing things as they choose. They are the same animals we keep in 4x6' boxes with some dirt, a couple of logs and a floodlamp. Most people can keep some of them, and some people can keep most of them. A few breed some of them, and have convinced themselves that this is good enough, that they understand monitors. Maybe so, but these are animals without many options, and in that sense we are not asking them the right questions. Here are a few of the things where you can offer the option in captivity, but shouldn't or don't need to, according to the ignoranus outlook.
Are monitors social?
Asking real monitors (ARM), the answer is no. There are dozens of carefully-done field studies involving maybe half of the world's species that all come to just about the same general conclusion. All species studied so far have stable home ranges that partially overlap. As a rough average, any individual adult monitor may share parts of its home range with 2-5 other adults, and share approximate borders with another 4-6 adults. All of these animals appear to "know" one another and exhibit some tolerance, while a "stranger" often gets a hostile reception. This seems to be about learning (and possibly relatedness). Individuals may recognize others by sight or by their locations, "that's Joe because Joe lives over there", and certainly by odors.
Thousands of hours of careful observation make it clear that wild monitors live physically separate lives. They do not bask on top of one another, 'share' food, or anything of the sort. Individuals come together for a few days during the breeding season (males always seek out females, sometimes going beyond their usual home ranges to do so), and they may congregate to take advantage of temporary concentrations of food, or to use unusual, patchy habitat features such as good nesting sites. All of these interactions are temporary, and seem to occur with minimal aggression. By contrast, when monitors encounter one another out bush 'by accident', interactions often lead to intense posturing, followed by fights or chases.
The role of odor in the lives of monitors is probably the single subject least understood by field biologists and keepers alike. Asking real monitors, it is very clear that odors play a central role in their lives, and particularly so in their interactions with other monitors. Wild monitors have elaborate scent-marking behaviors, and some investigators have come close to showing that monitors are very similar to some mammals in their ability to discern identity, age, sex and reproductive condition from olfactory information. Wild monitors are seemingly very careful about other aspects of odor, too. For example, V. scalaris and V. tristis will descend a home tree and go 20 yards or more away to defecate, then 'wipe their bottoms' in a direction away from their home tree before circling back to it. Why? Perhaps because pythons are very good at getting monitors in their holes overnight, and those animals that crap at the base of their tree may not be there in the morning.
Is crowding stressful?
ARM, almost surely so as an enforced way of life. As detailed above, monitors simply do not choose to pile on top of one another in the wild. They are socially tolerant under a few temporary circumstances, but otherwise live singly. By eliminating the option to get away from others in captivity (and this means out of sight, hearing and smell), we create highly unnatural conditions. Monitors are certainly adaptable, but the fact that certain combinations of individuals can be raised and kept together does not prove much of anything. People who think it does are confusing options and choices, forgetting about s/he males and generally being ignorant about the "asking" part of this thread. ARM, it is a source of chronic stress to keep animals together long-term, period. Give them the choice by opening the cage, and even so-called "bonded pairs" (which btw do not occur in nature, that female has a different John every day, Frank) will be scattered as far apart as they can get.
Some behaviors are instinctive, others learned. It is quite likely that the 'crap away from where you live' routine is hard-wired into monitors, and also likely that no monitor given the choice would take refuge within a python's length of where it has defecated. If everything in our boxes smells like pythons' heaven, how does this stress an instinct? What are the long-term physiological consequences of always living with the saturating odor of other individuals? Do small monitor species ever 'get used to' smelling or seeing large monitor species in close proximity? No one knows, but if you take the ARM approach, these things are almost surely not good for captive animals.
Is multiclutching normal?
ARM, no, almost never. There is no evidence, none, in any of the hundreds of detailed studies of wild monitors to suggest that females regularly produce more than a single clutch of eggs in a year. It is physiologically possible (that's not the issue), but wild monitors do not do so. Reproductive cycling in the wild is closely tied to seasonal cues (temperature, rainfall, food availability, etc.), and the energy budgets of both males and females are carefully apportioned among expenditures for growth, reproduction, and survival through harsh intervals. Most of the time females of most monitor species probably cannot cycle more than once and survive (or produce young that would survive). If they could, natural selection would quickly see to it that they did.
We usually think of reproductive stresses affecting females, but if you ARM, the breeding season may be equally stressful to males, who often do not feed for weeks while vigorously attending to their several scattered Janes (again, so much for bonded pairs).
Something is messed up when captive monitors cycle and breed repeatedly in a single year. The normal physiological cues that initiate and shut down cycling have gone haywire, and it is anyone's guess as to what the causes might be. The lack of seasonal cues in captivity, an environment saturated with pheromones of the opposite sex, etc. are logical possibilities. Multiclutching is not a sign of good husbandry practices unless you are a commercial breeder eager to turn a profit.
Do physical cycles matter?
ARM, you bet they do. In nature it gets dark and cool more or less regularly, and humidity varies a lot. There is no need to go over the evidence that natural or captive breeding of many reptiles (even tropical species) requires physical cycling. When you keep monitors under lights 24/7 at near-constant humidity, and make statements such as "it's dark in their holes, haha" you exhibit a pretty basic misunderstanding of biology by claiming that animals are not physiologically affected by physical cycles.
Do monitors need UV radiation?
ARM, yes, they do. Reptiles can get vitamin D compounds from their food, or synthesize it by reactions that require UVB radiation. Either will prevent difficulties with calcium metabolism, but the dietary route does not trigger the rest of the biochemical processes that flow from Vitamin D synthesis. These are poorly known in reptiles, but probably include (at least) pigment synthesis and the endocrine pathways that affect production of a wide range of hormones. You can certainly keep monitors using dietary D3 alone, but do you know what all of the effects are? The only argument I have heard besides 'don't need none' is based on a calculation of how much profit a commercial breeder made by not buying UV lights for his animals.
So what's a fella to do?
Captivity is about reduced options, period. If you decide not to keep them, fine, but others (including myself) are going to continue to do so, for al of our various reasons. In that case, nobody disagrees that the only way to do it is by "asking the monitors". What I am advocating is that we ask real monitors as part of that process. Not only, but also. Where some people miss the point is, again, by asking only captives whose options have already been severely constrained by what we think they need in those conditions.
People have different agendas – some want pets, some simply appreciate monitors for what they are, some want to cut into the WC trade by producing CB animals, some want laying chickens that crank out clutches for sale, and so on. Monitor species also differ, and some, such as members of the prasinus and indicus groups, need a lot more ARM than do ackies, albigularis or argus.
Understand what you're doing and why, but also keep the biology of real monitors in mind.
Since you've already said what you think of this post before reading it, Frank, I don't suppose you'll need to respond. When it comes to analogies about pretty girls and you, what I'm saying here is that your way of keeping monitors is kinda like the two of you being stranded on a desert island – after a while you might look OK. All I'm doing is parking a cruise ship offshore and asking her if she'd like more choices.
