WATER MONITOR CARE SHEET

Water Monitor Article from Reptiles Magazine December 2003

Check out the Pro Exotics Monitor Pro Pack.

This caresheet addresses Water Monitor availability, morphs, seasonality, sexing, pricing, shipping, and most importantly, setup and care.

There is no longer a "season" for baby Water Monitors, as the Indo farming system is able to supply quality babies throughout the year. Stay in touch with us frequently, or get on our email notification list, so you can be up to date on the latest animals available, and have the best shot at securing one of our truly special animals. We have had tremendous results working with the babies coming in from Sumatra, and as of 2002, we will be offering these babies nearly exclusively. There are also a few hidden treasures available, for the right price and right customer, which are animals of extraordinary pattern, color, and quality, and these are well worth the consideration of the serious collector.

Please keep in mind before choosing a Water monitor as your next animal that this is the largest commercially available lizard. You should expect your cute baby Water to be a full grown 6 ft adult, 65-75 pounds, if not more, and you need to be prepared, not just with caging and feeding strategies, but economical strategies as well. Feeding and housing such a large animal is no cheap venture.

That is not to say that Water monitors are to be avoided, for they are honestly one of the tamest monitors available, and have great personalities along with terrific interaction potential.

We go through a lot of trouble at Pro Exotics to provide the best Waters in the country, and i sincerely believe Pro Exotics offers the cream of the crop in Water (and certainly other) monitor babies. That is made possible by our animal selection process, as well as our husbandry practices, both of which contribute to extremely healthy, vibrant, beautiful animals.

We select our animals from the thousands of baby Waters hatched in Indonesia every year, where 99% of the babies in the u.s. come from. From the thousands of babies offered to us each year, we select only the very best animals, cherry picked for color, pattern, and health. A key to making the best selection possible is being offered the first pick of each shipment of monitors, and through the years, we have worked our way to the absolute top of the ladder, and no one picks monitors before we have had a chance to turn them down first. Certainly it helps that we work closely with Bushmaster Reptiles, the premier importer of Indonesian reptiles (not just monitors, but snakes and other reptiles as well) in the country. Kamuran has logged hundreds of hours at the Indo farms (Chad has put in his time there as well), working to consistently bring in the latest and greatest, and he takes great pride in setting the industry importing standard. On the other hand, we take great pride in trying to set the standard for caring for these amazing animals once they have reached the u.s. We have started to see a very limited selection (VERY limited!) of u.s.c.b. Water monitor babies, and these awesome animals command a premium price of $225-$350 each.

All of our monitors at Pro Exotics are approached with a similar strategy, varying here and there to account for feeding and humidity needs, but it basically breaks down to "keep 'em hot and feed 'em a lot!"

Water monitor babies are kept at Pro Exotics in either single setups, or in pairs, in 20 gallon long tanks. There is no trough filled with dozens and dozens of babies, as you will find at other facilities. Our animals are kept on dampened (not wet) cypress mulch, with multiple hide spots (see the Wood Stack hidespot FAQ at our site). There is a large water bowl available at all times, and the elevated wood stacks on one side provide for a basking spot. The cages and water bowls are cleaned daily (many facilities clean weekly and some not at all!) and we also have a weekly soaking program for all of our monitors (including breeders).

Soaking your monitors weekly is not only recommended, but an important aspect of PE husbandry. Soaking in room temp water for 1 to 2 hours allows the animals to completely hydrate, as well as helps with any stuck sheds on the delicate toes and tails. You should use water that comes up to the shoulder (or body thickness) of your monitor, so they can easily keep their heads above water. We have used this technique for a few years now, and have had tremendous success. Keep in mind that when soaking baby monitors (or snakes), they often float on the water, not having enough mass to sink to the bottom and walk around in water up to their tiny shoulders. If they literally have to swim in the water for the entire 2 hours, they may die of exhaustion.

Our substrate preferences for monitors in our collection have changed with time, and while we used to use cypress mulch almost exclusively, we have now largely switched over to soil. After trying a few different soil mixes (check out that FAQ), we not only found a "store bought" mix that works well, but a locally purchased decomposed granite that works extremely well, holding both moisture and burrows beautifully. This decomposed granite is now our preferred substrate, and while we continue to keep the baby Waters on cypress before shipping out, you should consider a soil mix for your permanent setup, your monitors will be much happier for it.

Temperatures are another crucial factor (along with proper hydration and nutrition) to a healthy monitor. You cannot afford to make a mistake in this area, as it can mean life or death for your animal. You also cannot cut corners in this area. Toss out your dial thermometers, and stick those color changing strips on the bottom of the trashcan, that is where they belong. You can get terrific digital thermometers from Pro Exotics for $15. These come with a probe, and they have a Min/Max reading as well. You can mount the base of the thermometer inside the cage, in an area away from the basking spot, to measure the ambient temperature of the cage itself. Move the probe around the cage, check the basking spot, check the hide spots, check the "favorite" spot, check the far end of the cage. Check it all, and know what is happening. Find the range of your cage, from hottest spot to coldest spot, use the Min/Max reading to check your night drop, and then make sure these temps fall within the parameters you have set. If they don't match, do what you need to do to get them there. Changing a hot spot from 95° F to 130° F is often as simple as raising the basking spot a few more inches toward the basking light. (Upgrade your temperature capabilities with a Temp Gun.)

We use basking spot temperatures of 130° F for the Water babies, with ambient cage temperatures of 85° F. At night, it is important that the temperatures do not drop below 80° F. If you insist on allowing the temps to drop below 80°, you may start to court respiratory infections, so it is important to use red bulbs, ceramic bulbs, heat panels, or whatever it takes to keep those temps up and your monitor healthy. Many large monitor breeders, including Pro Exotics, often run daylight cycles and temps 24 hours a day. This keeps temps up, metabolism high, and our monitors stay in the best of health. You don't have to run a 24/7 day cycle, but look at your night drop closely when brainstorming about your lethargic (or mouth bubbling, or non eating) monitor.

Along with the proper temperatures, feeding plays a key factor in the well being of the baby Waters. Pro Exotics' diet consists of crickets, mealworms, feeder roaches, rodents, and thawed raw ground turkey. We supplement the food items with Miner-All nearly every feeding. Crickets or mealworms are offered 4 days a week, crawler mice (thawed) are offered one day a week (typically one or two crawlers per baby Water), and turkey is offered on one day as well. We strongly encourage folks to feed meat no more than twice a week. Crickets should make up the bulk of a baby monitor’s diet, and the animal will grow terrifically if fed on supplemented crickets alone.

Meats are offered for additional protein and calories, but you must keep in mind that these are small babies, and as such have small digestive systems. Loading them down with too much meat will not only encourage compaction and digestion problems, but it will act like monitor steroids on these guys, and you will then have an aggressive terror on your hands. Many customers have called to ask about the aggressiveness of their new baby Water, and more often than not, it is the case that they simply enjoy watching their animal chase and eat the mice, and they have been feeding nearly an all meat diet. When switched back to a cricket based diet, these same animals return to their predictable, tractable selves, within a few weeks. Raise a Water Monitor, not a Water Monster, follow our recommended diet.

The big change many keepers insist on making is offering a "wide and varied diet". We consider the above mentioned diet to be plenty wide and plenty varied. The additional foods keepers feed to their monitors often come with an additional price. Wild caught food items typically harbor nasty parasites that your baby is not going to be equipped to handle. "Feeder goldfish" are some of the nastiest things available, you are not feeding an Oscar, you are feeding a captive lizard. Exotic foods like crayfish and crabs are not only expensive, but seasonal, and what exactly are you going to do when your new baby monitor gets hooked on food that costs $8 per pound or more and refuses to eat anything else? Did i ever tell you about the guy who got baby rabbits to feed his ball python to "celebrate" Easter? Why??!! This stuff happens. Too frequently. Play it smart, feed a steady, proven, inexpensive diet, and have a terrifically healthy monitor.

Speaking of healthy monitors, Pro Exotics also goes through a medication process with our farm hatched monitors, using Flagyl, Panacur, and Droncit medications to address any internal parasite situations. Our babies are successively wormed three times each to ensure not only a healthy appetite, but a healthy metabolism and growth rate. Going through this process on your own time and money can cost more than a hundred dollars through a veterinarian, here at Pro Exotics, we do it as a part of our routine husbandry.

For those of you wanting "a pair" of Water monitors, or a "female" baby, you have to understand that monitors (of all types) are not visually sexable as babies, and there is no way to guarantee a particular sex when you are selling babies. Anyone who tells you different is trying to deceive you. Sexual characteristics start showing up as early as six months old, and as late as a year. You can look for head shapes, body shapes, hemipenal bulges, and other factors when trying to determine sex, but it is all still educated guess work. Unless a male monitor plainly everts a hemipene in your view, it is so very difficult to be sure of the sex of your animal (females will also evert a similar looking hemiclitoris, only confounding the situation). Some folks may have a "female" monitor for 3 years before it has suddenly everted a hemipene that wasn't thought to have existed in the first place. At Pro Exotics, we are happy to go through the available animals, comparing the few characteristics, and select animals to fit your needs to our best abilities, but a particular sex just cannot be guaranteed.

To clear up any confusion as to available localities of Water Monitor babies, i will explain the pattern differences between the normals, Sumatrans, and Speckleds. The normal Water monitor babies are from across the Indo/Malaysia/Java range, and have a typical Water monitor pattern of 5 or 6 bands/rows of large yellow spots going down the back. The HY, or Sumatran, which is a new locality made available only in the past few years (in recent memory), has the typical pattern, but also has a wash of additional yellow color and spotting over the body, making for a "high yellow" animal, with a beautiful overall look. The Speckled Water monitors are from the small island of Sulawesi, and they are imported less frequently than the other localities. The Speckleds lack the normal pattern altogether, and instead are peppered from head to toe with thousands of tiny yellow and orange spots, creating a general haze of color when viewed from a distance. Each of these localities can be viewed in our monitor photo gallery.

All of the patterns continue into maturity, although color fades a bit as it does with many reptiles. The normal and HY animals are full sized animals, commonly reaching 6 ft. and 65-75 pounds or more. The Speckled Waters, still a large lizard, reach the same 4-6 ft. length, but typically carry less mass than the other localities, making them "smaller" than the full sized animals.

As for our decision to concentrate on the Water monitor babies coming from Sumatra, we have found over the past few years those animals are the most in demand from our discriminating customers. The Sumatran animal is the prettiest of the "common" Water monitors available, and they are of the highest quality. The Speckled Waters are interesting animals, especially from a collecting point of view, but the quality of those babies is often poor, and there is simply not enough interest to justify our continued efforts with them. A beautiful "Normal" animal can be a stunning specimen, and while we are not working with any normal Malaysian locality animals, we still do see animals from Sumatra with more of a "normal" pattern (less bleeding of color, darker banding), and it is always best to call in and check on the most up to date availability information.

Our Sumatran babies break down into a few different price levels. Our "basic" Sumatran babies are $150 ea. Please keep in mind our selection is still outstanding, our husbandry efforts are intense, and the animals at this price level are still going to be the hottest looking Waters on the market. I have often seen other advertisements for "super hot" baby Waters priced upwards of $200 that still don’t compare visually with our animals at $150, and healthwise, forget about it. When you ship out babies two days after receiving them, you simply CAN’T compare to PE animals that have been in our care for 3 months.

From the $150 price, we have animals priced at $165, $185, $200, and (very rarely) up. These babies are going to be of exceptional pattern, color, tameness, or some terrific combination of all three. Each significant exception bumps the animal up one category, and an animal at $185 or $200 is going to be one of the rarest and most spectacular specimens of the year.

At different points of the year, we sometimes come across "special" animals, ones with truly spectacular color, pattern AND temper. These "super" Waters are priced individually, and are typically $200 or better, but they are highly sought after, in high demand, and sell very quickly. Stay in touch with us for the best selection of these special individual animals throughout the year.

Shipping of the monitor babies is typically $35 for UPS Overnight to your door, and there is a $10 box charge for the insulated box and heat packs, and certainly we do pay close attention to extreme weather conditions when selecting a shipping date. (See our shipping info here.)

That's pretty much it for the Water babies, and you may have noticed the care is very similar to our approach with other monitor babies. The truth is, we approach them all similarly, adjusting each setup to account for size differences and humidity needs. Temps don't vary much, and neither does the feeding. We work extremely hard here at Pro Exotics to provide you with the very best monitor babies in the country, and we take great pride in what we do. We offer complete customer support, and we are available by phone or email for your monitor questions. Thanks for taking the time to consider us, and we look forward to helping you select a great baby in the future.

POST NOTES:

Lots of folks ask about further information on keeping larger, adult monitors, so I will cover that very briefly here.

Caring for a larger monitor is not that much different from caring for a baby, in theory. It is harder to nail your temps in a larger cage, and you have to adjust a number of the details like diet and feeding, but most aspects of successful husbandry are based on the same line of thinking.

For an adult Water monitor, you should expect to provide at least a 10 ft.-12 ft. cage, and perhaps an entire room. We built a number of 10 foot circular cages in 2002 that have worked very well for larger monitors (Ionides). They are built around the galvanized water trough bases, for our breeders they are 10 feet in diameter, and they have an additional 2 feet of height that brings the total height of the cage to about 4 foot. This allows for 2 feet of soil, and another 2 feet for basking light and cage furniture setup. We don’t have specific plans, we simply applied ideas and theory that we have learned from years of keeping reptiles, and the cages have turned out very well. We do have pictures of these cages available at our site, in the monitor and facility photo albums, check them out for ideas for your own custom caging.

The internet does not have a lot of large monitor caging information available, but try some of the caging and monitor forums at kingsnake.com, and you will be able to see what other folks have done, some successfully, some not. I would certainly encourage you to base your larger cage around a galvanized water trough base, and build up from there, it is easily the most durable, long lasting, economical choice available at this time.

After about a year’s time, your diet for your baby Water should start focusing less on the insects, and more on the meats, and for a yearling, a rodent based diet is healthy, affordable, and ideal. Your feeding may gradually go from 7 days a week to 3, 4, or 5 days a week, and that is one of the details that varies from animal to animal. With the proper basking spots, and full size adult animal can still digest a lot of food, so once a week feeding (an old husbandry technique) is not recommended.

We have a lot more applicable, usable, and valuable information at our site’s FAQ, but I will list some of the Water monitor related FAQ’s here for you:

What is a Monitor Pro Pack?

Strategies for Creating a Monitor Breeding Group

The Importance of a Temp Gun and Knowing Your Temperatures

I can't afford a Temp Gun, is there a cheaper alternative?

Why don't you sell Nile Monitors?

How do I feed the turkey diet?

How do you mix your soil?

What is a "Retes Stack"?

Why do you have a soaking program?

Keeping an ideal setup

Gee Robyn, do you have any feelings on hidespots?

Why do you suggest using a glove?

My monitor book/internet tells me such and such, you are telling me different

Be sure to check out our info packed FAQ that covers ALL KINDS of great reptile info!

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