Quote:
Originally Posted by bodiddleyitis
Yes, some butaan keepers have been experienced varanid breeders. In practical terms, monitor nutrition is all about fat. Mineral deficiencies are not an issue when you always coat your food in soil. You might assume that if an animals has had a specific diet for millions of years that selection might favour the individuals best able to utilise specific types of fat. Most species of monitor lizard that we know about have a generalist diet in the wild, but a few do not.
I think that anybody who spent a day with savannah monitors in the wild would be convinced that the animals had a very specialised natural history. But an analogy might be the European badger; if you only know about badgers in boxes, you could easily be mistaken into thinking that this was a ferocious carnivore which could easily kill a dog and would eat just about anything it could find. You might also suspect that badgers would hunt other large mammals in packs. If you then went to watch wild badgers you might interpret their search for earthworms as a hunt for baby rabbits, but by the end of the night you'd be thinking that these particular badgers must just find it easiest to look for worms, and that the fierce packing hunting badgers were elsewhere.
I think that one of the saddest thing about this is that the pet trade has made this quite extraordinary monitor lizard into a generic product for "monitor lovers". It ticks all the boxes with regard to price, ability to withstand dessication and looking cute and prehistoric. But it doesn't have a macho diet like the Komodo dragon, and it's very much in the interests of marketing the animals to dismiss its ecological specialisations as the result of not enough data. All monitors are the same, right?
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Which numptie's think badgers eat baby rabbits?
Weasels, ferrets, stoats, polecats... They eat rabbits and are far better at it than badgers...
Out of interest Daniel... is there any research into the way mice/rats affect bosc's systems?
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