Any ideas?

[Dom]

Well, id like to say, this has been by far my worst year ever .. since the first of 2003 everything has been going wrong for me ..

It seems my streak of bad luck reach its climax today when I found my small 8 inches black throated monitor dead. It is so frustrating - especially when I don't understand what killed em'.

He is wc and came from one of the worst place imaginable "the famous wholesaler in MTL" .. I had decided not to deworm him because he was so small .. obviously I did make a bad choice.. He was my first ever wc (that was not LTC) b4 I got him ..

Info on him .. he ate at least 2 and a half days ago .. as of saturday morning he seemed perfectly fine .. left and came back on sunday late afternoon only to find him dead not hard with eyes sunken in and a bad smell..

This is what I saw .. mayby u could help with the cause of death .. his intestines and colon were abnormally gastric .. There was a possible fatty tissue or worm like thing - about 2 mm stuck on his bladder I beleive .. not sure as too wether it had legs or if it was a fatty tissue - probably a fatty tissu ..

Right under his stomach, I saw a tiny ball a bit bigger the point of a pen..round in structure..?? and he had tinny little bugs in his mouth.. possibly mites although I never saw them on him before and to me they did not look like mites .. I have seen mite hundreds of times b4 ..

I just want to say, I apreciate the sympathy from everyone but I am really looking for info on what was the cause of death .. this is the best description without a camera that I could give .. hmm also, the colon was openned only to find feecees that seemed absent of any obvious parasites but some signs of a bit of dirt ingestion - not large amounts..

Let me know If anyone can help

Take care
Dom

[V.aw]

Hey Dom, sorry for your loss.

We aquired a baby albig ourselves, from the same wholesaler in june of 2002.

We didn't worm it for the same reasons you didnt. he was small, and eating incredibly well. Very veracious.

We took him to the vet when we found him losing mass rather quickly, and just didnt look well at all.

The vet kept him in an incubator overnight after doing bloodwork.
The little guy had kidney failure, so it was impossible to diagnose it until it was too late.

Sounds like a very similar case.. The bugs may have been mites.. Although if you havent seen many mites on him previously, they may have just been small flies, as you said you found him in the first stages of decomposition.. Was he defecating normally and everything? Some of the signs sound like crypto. Because you said the colon and intestines looked bloated.. Its so hard to say when its a WC animal. Theres a hell of a lot of possibilities.. I just threw my experience at you, hopefully it helped.. Maybe others may have some better insight.
once again, sorry for the loss.

[V.aw]

Oh, and just to add i really haven't seen many monitors die of parasites provided kept in the right conditions, and you seem to know what you're doing.. So i think you can almost rule that out.. But baby reptiles always have a high mortality rate, so it could be a billion different things. :(