If anyone has monitors or other lizards that die in your care or know of where I could find some, please let me know! (or X rays)
I’m currently a second year PhD student in California in a lab that studies reproduction in a whole host of things from birds to kelp to mammals etc. I’m a huge reptile lover along with the rest of my lab (our office is full of snakes, lizards, and geckos we love as pets, but don’t study). I
've recently started researching monitors and reptiles more broadly because they have a totally crazy reproductive system and we know very little about it. I work with the Natural History Museum nearby examining specimen and taking scans of their reproductive tract, but the issue is, since so few people actually preserve these large lizards from museum collections, there isn’t much data we can collect. Another issue I face is that I do not want to harm or euthanize any animals in my research (I’m a huge animal lover and a vegan to boot), but traditionally this is the method for this kind of research.
As someone looking to study animals without harming them, situations like this are an absolutely invaluable way to get ethically sourced specimen. One of my biggest inspirations is a researcher also refuses to euthanize animals and instead sources her specimen in a similar manner (being given animals who have already passed and would otherwise be thrown away etc).
So if you or someone you know has some dead lizards on their hands, I’d love to get in contact with them!
This sounds like super interesting work! Don’t monitors have different sex chromosomes? (By which I mean, not xx/xy.) I seem to remember reading that somewhere, though I can’t remember what their sex chromosomes actually are.
I don’t keep lizards, but my dad is a geology professor at UCSB, so I can ask him if anyone in herpetology currently works with large lizards. How “fresh” do the specimens have to be? For example, would a preserved wet specimen still be valuable? And are you only interested in sexually mature adults, or would hatchlings or juveniles still be useful?
I would reach out to places in Florida who collect invasive iguanas, tegu, and monitors from the wild! They likely have a lot of live-to-rehome or recently decreased animals you could potentially get your hands on, depending on shipping laws.
You could maybe set up a collaborative effort where invasive specimens are collected and stored for you to study?
Yeah they do! They have a ZZ/ZW system like birds. I’m glad you find the research interesting
I’d be so honored for you to ask your dad, thats super cool he does geology. The specimen are totally fine to be frozen or preserved. Any age range would help answer development questions, but adults are ideal. Male or females are fine. I’d really love to see both since it takes two to tango so to speak.
Thanks for you response and any help you can offer!
That’s genius! The researcher I was referencing actually gets her specimen, Burmese pythons, from Florida when they get culled. I’d love to have a similar exchange.
Thanks for your response!
