Kimberley Rock Monitors

[Stompsy]

Those are some very nice pictures of Gillen's Monitors! I spent a few years breeding oodles of them, they're absolutely brilliant little critters, one of the reptiles I miss most. When I started thinking about keeping them, few Australians could manage to even keep them alive long term. I looked at what the Americans were doing and basically copied them with my own tweaks, and they utterly thrived and bred like flies. For a while I tried to tell people how to keep them when they were buying them, but no one would believe me and they were having the same troubles as ever, then I wrote an article for Reptiles Australia magazine which was in print so people took more seriously and it seemed to help a lot of people (and I'm sure around that time other people started copying the Americans and also working it out independently, I'm not trying to single handedly take credit). I saw someone mention the brief care sheet I wrote for the VHS, I can scarcely remember it, it was a long time ago now, but there doesn't seem to be much information about them (back at that time I was getting phone calls and online requests for information about them all the time, it was crazy Yet even then almost no one wanted to take my advice and still kept them like snakes with blue globes on a thermostat set to 28 degrees for heat ).

You could almost boil the care sheet down to one sentence: Blasting hot basking spot.

Or a paragraph:
They're not pythons. They need a blasting hot basking spot of at least 50 degrees, and up to 80+ degrees is great. I've had them bask close to 90 degrees, yes, Celsius, and touched them when their skin was so hot my hurt my skin a little. That's the #1 mistake people used to make with them. At a flat ambient temperature of 30ish degrees, as most people used to use, they're going to be lucky to survive.

I used to get them to breed at under 12 months and produce a clutch every 3-5 weeks during the breeding season. I also never had an infertile egg and I never had one fail to hatch. If I ever live in Australia again I'll probably get back into them, I really loved them.

Well then, I'll have to pick your brain as some of the care sheets I've read completely contradict each other. And yes, I read the VHS article.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[CrazyNut]

Those are some very nice pictures of Gillen's Monitors! I spent a few years breeding oodles of them, they're absolutely brilliant little critters, one of the reptiles I miss most. When I started thinking about keeping them, few Australians could manage to even keep them alive long term. I looked at what the Americans were doing and basically copied them with my own tweaks, and they utterly thrived and bred like flies. For a while I tried to tell people how to keep them when they were buying them, but no one would believe me and they were having the same troubles as ever, then I wrote an article for Reptiles Australia magazine which was in print so people took more seriously and it seemed to help a lot of people (and I'm sure around that time other people started copying the Americans and also working it out independently, I'm not trying to single handedly take credit). I saw someone mention the brief care sheet I wrote for the VHS, I can scarcely remember it, it was a long time ago now, but there doesn't seem to be much information about them (back at that time I was getting phone calls and online requests for information about them all the time, it was crazy Yet even then almost no one wanted to take my advice and still kept them like snakes with blue globes on a thermostat set to 28 degrees for heat ).

You could almost boil the care sheet down to one sentence: Blasting hot basking spot.

Or a paragraph:
They're not pythons. They need a blasting hot basking spot of at least 50 degrees, and up to 80+ degrees is great. I've had them bask close to 90 degrees, yes, Celsius, and touched them when their skin was so hot my hurt my skin a little. That's the #1 mistake people used to make with them. At a flat ambient temperature of 30ish degrees, as most people used to use, they're going to be lucky to survive.

I used to get them to breed at under 12 months and produce a clutch every 3-5 weeks during the breeding season. I also never had an infertile egg and I never had one fail to hatch. If I ever live in Australia again I'll probably get back into them, I really loved them.

28C??????? No UVB????? Come on how rediculous can you be??? All you have to do is look at where they live! I'm sitting here shaking my head thinking how could these early piarneres get it so wrong? Was it all small monitors or just gillenii?

 

[Bushfire]

- - - Updated - - -

 

[Sheldoncooper]

View attachment 318661

- - - Updated - - -

View attachment 318663View attachment 318662

Extremely jealous. There awesome

 

[BredliFreak]

View attachment 318661

- - - Updated - - -

View attachment 318663View attachment 318662

MMMMMMM red glauerti

 

[pinefamily]

Great photos Bushfire. Thanks for sharing.

 

[CrazyNut]

View attachment 318661

- - - Updated - - -

View attachment 318663View attachment 318662

I is all jelly. You are so lucky.

 

[Stompsy]

View attachment 318661

- - - Updated - - -

View attachment 318663View attachment 318662

Well that's just mean. They are just fantastic. But you sir/ma'am are a tease!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Sdaji]

Stompsy: The VHS care sheet wasn't the article I was talking about. It was published in Reptiles Australia A lot of people read that VHS care sheet and assumed it was the full article.

28C??????? No UVB????? Come on how rediculous can you be??? All you have to do is look at where they live! I'm sitting here shaking my head thinking how could these early piarneres get it so wrong? Was it all small monitors or just gillenii?

Actually, a lot of those people used the UV, but UV is a complete waste of time. I experimented with dragons, skinks and monitors, it never made any difference, even after multiple generations. UV is one of the biggest myths in the international herp hobby. Yes, in some cases they can use it to synthesise vitamin D3, and yes, in the wild it's probably of some importance, but even using the expensive UV tubes, I've never found it to make any difference to captive reptiles, and if you look at what the big breeders do (as opposed to what they say) they don't bother with artificial UV. Dietary D3 supplements are critical in many cases, your herps will die or be really unwell without it. Artificial UV is an expensive waste of time. But no one ever made any money out of not selling UV lighting, so no one has ever bothered to stamp the myth out.

It was all small monitors. Steve Irwin actually testified under oath in court saying that small monitors were impossible to breed in captivity (arrogantly based on the fact that he was unable to do it), in order to prove someone must have poached theirs, even though they'd actually bred them - it used to be literally considered impossible to breed small monitors in captivity Things have changed a lot in the last 20 years. When I first advertised captive bred gilleni in Australia, I had a lot of amazed people calling me, mostly not wanting to buy them, just wanting to talk to me about it. It was really rare and unusual back then. I just copied what the Americans had been doing, bought hatchlings and had them breeding within months.

 

[Grunter023]

Those are some very nice pictures of Gillen's Monitors! I spent a few years breeding oodles of them, they're absolutely brilliant little critters, one of the reptiles I miss most. When I started thinking about keeping them, few Australians could manage to even keep them alive long term. I looked at what the Americans were doing and basically copied them with my own tweaks, and they utterly thrived and bred like flies. For a while I tried to tell people how to keep them when they were buying them, but no one would believe me and they were having the same troubles as ever, then I wrote an article for Reptiles Australia magazine which was in print so people took more seriously and it seemed to help a lot of people (and I'm sure around that time other people started copying the Americans and also working it out independently, I'm not trying to single handedly take credit). I saw someone mention the brief care sheet I wrote for the VHS, I can scarcely remember it, it was a long time ago now, but there doesn't seem to be much information about them (back at that time I was getting phone calls and online requests for information about them all the time, it was crazy [emoji14] Yet even then almost no one wanted to take my advice and still kept them like snakes with blue globes on a thermostat set to 28 degrees for heat [emoji14] ).

You could almost boil the care sheet down to one sentence: Blasting hot basking spot.

Or a paragraph:
They're not pythons. They need a blasting hot basking spot of at least 50 degrees, and up to 80+ degrees is great. I've had them bask close to 90 degrees, yes, Celsius, and touched them when their skin was so hot my hurt my skin a little. That's the #1 mistake people used to make with them. At a flat ambient temperature of 30ish degrees, as most people used to use, they're going to be lucky to survive.

I used to get them to breed at under 12 months and produce a clutch every 3-5 weeks during the breeding season. I also never had an infertile egg and I never had one fail to hatch. If I ever live in Australia again I'll probably get back into them, I really loved them.

Hey Sdaji do you happen to know which issue your Gillen's article was in Reptiles Australia? Or do you have a copy of the article?

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

 

[Imported_tuatara]

And here I was thinking an Ackie bite on the tip of my finger was painful.....

Yep, sticking with smaller species me thinks! :shock:

I have absolutely no plans to get a Lacey! A small monitor will do me just fine.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

oh how things can change!

 

[Stompsy]

oh how things can change!

Hahahahaha!

 

[Smittiferous]

She had no choice. It just arrived out of the blue.

 

[Stompsy]

She had no choice. It just arrived out of the blue.

This is true. Both of my Lacey’s have been gifts from Smitti.

We are currently building a massive enclosure for Enki and I’m hoping he’ll appreciate the massive amount of space he’ll have once we are done.