Overview

"""The Bengal Monitor"", a comprehensive study on a single reptile species, completes Walter Auffenberg's monumental trilogy on the behavioural ecology of monitor lizards. Together the books provide baseline ecological principles and behavioural descriptions that scientists will use to frame all future theoretical models of the genus ""Varanus"". The group consists of about 50 species, all found in the Old World, many of which are considered endangered. Unlike the lizard species emphasised in the first two books, the Bengal monitor inhabits a huge range, extending from Java to the Iran and Afghanistan borders, including many different habitats. To unravel the biological elements of this lizard's survival strategies, Auffenberg concentrates on the diet and foraging behaviour of the Bengal monitor, studying its prey base - mainly small insects - in remarkable detail. Because most monitors are mainly insectivorous, this book reflects the more usual pattern in which these lizards compete with other predatory birds and mammals in the local environment. The descriptions of complex ecological relationships assure the book's use by parasitologists, entomologists, mammalogists and ecologists generally. To study the lizards (which measure about five feet from nose to tail), Auffenberg captured them with techniques that depended on his location and often on local good will: licensed hide hunters shot specimens out of trees in Malaysia; trained dogs trapped them in Myanmar; in the marshy lakes on the Indus Valley he hired tribal Jogi ""snake charmers"" to flush them from cover and catch them by hand. During a 20-year period, his research for ""The Bengal Monitor"" took him to museums, laboratories, and field sites throughout southern Asia and then home to Florida, where he observed a colony of monitors that he transplanted to greenhouses in his backyard."

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