Feeding new baby monitor

[AdamL8]

A. Fish tank piss poor for a monitor. PERIOD. Every intelligent monitor keeper agrees with this.
B. 40 gallon too small. If your monitor fits in a 40 gallon after 4 months, you've got problems, likely brought on by the bad environment in the tank!

It is perfectly acceptable to use a heavily modified fish tank which would mean a sealed top with an inside halogen and some type of insulation such as foam or plywood on the outside to hold in the heat. A factory fresh tank with a mesh top is what everybody agrees is awful. A healthy Sav can easily live its first 4 months in a 40 gallon breeder assuming it is modified for monitor use. Much past this will be really pushing it especially if you end up with a male. If you can have the adult enclosure or any larger enclosure set up before 4 months I would of course suggest using it since it will be better in every way.

I was too busy providing my monitor with a non fish tank enclosure to read every line in this thread.

Do you happen to have any pictures of your enclosure and monitor? Of course not everybody wants to read through several pages. Nobody minds if you don't but there's no need to snap at somebody for letting you know that something you confronted them on was something that was already discussed and answered.

Wrongo again, doesn't matter if you don't need as "warm of temps to digest insects". You have to feed more of them to equal the same volume of other prey items,...

I don't disagree that 115 is insufficient. I would guess that digesting insects does take less energy than digesting rodents or other heavy meats. There are also probably more unusable bits on insects than on rodents so you would indeed need slightly more of them by weight to equal the same meat that you get from rodents. I see no reason to not use the same temperatures of 130-145 regardless.

If you can afford to enclose the tank in plywood,surely he can afford to spend the extra $10 on some sealant and the top/bottom of the plywood enclosed box to make a plywood cage do you not agree? How can you enclose a tank but say you cant use those exact same pieces of wood to make a box- which will be an improvement from the tank...... It's not difficult !

Majority of savs die due to people thinking they can survive 'until I can afford bigger and better enclosures' and it shortens their lives dramatically due to this mindset.

Most people don't enclose the tank in plywood and use a fish tank simply because they already have them lying around or because it's convenient to buy. If somebody was going to fully enclose it in wood anyways then I agree that they should just spend the extra bit to finish it instead of using a makeshift enclosure. It's really not difficult but most people that buy Savs don't want to put any effort at all forward since they paid so little for the actual lizard.

I think that the mindset which causes problems is people thinking that they know better than those who have successfully kept and raised monitors even when presented with all the facts. That is not at all aimed at you so don't take it that way. There are really any number of things that cause Savs to die since so many of them die every single year.