monitor has gas?

[crocdoc]

I'm going to add my two cents worth. I've skimmed over many of the replies here, so I apologise if I repeat anything anyone else has said.

In my experience with my lace monitors, there are two circumstances under which they will bloat after a meal (despite having very hot basking spots).

1. The first circumstance is a new food item. One of the posters mentioned gut bacteria and I agree with them that may be at least part of the issue. Although monitors are capable of digesting all sorts of things, there is a bit of gut 'training' involved. For example, wild lace monitors can eat the most rancid of road-killed carrion, but if someone tried to feed that same rotting flesh to a captive that had never been exposed to it before, they'd bloat to the point that they'd have to regurgitate it. After a couple of exposures they develop the right gut flora to deal with it and are better able to cope.

2. The second circumstance is food items with a thick skin or exoskeleton. Occasionally I'll get old, ex-breeder rats and feed them to my adult male lace monitor. The first time I did this he bloated up a fair bit and I realised that it took a while for his digestive juices to cut through the skin of the rat (if any of you have tried to dissect a 800-900 gram rat, you'll know how thick their skin is) and in the interim the rat started to rot. It was also a new food item the first time I tried this, so the lace monitor got the double-whammy of thick skinned prey and unfamiliar item for his digestive tract. After that I got into the practice of cutting slices into the skin of dead rats, particularly into the gut cavity of the rat, so that the monitor's digestive juices can go straight in. The bloating stopped.

In the OP's situation, the questions I'd ask would be: are any of the items new prey items? Squid is soft bodied and would probably only be an issue if it were new. Crayfish have an indigestible exoskeleton, so it may take a while for the monitor's digestive juices to cut through to the digestible bits inside. The rats' skin may be a barrier for the monitor.

Try killing the crayfish and cutting them up, or cutting slices into the rats and see if that makes a difference. Even small rats have much thicker skin than mice of a similar size.