Earless monitor lizard

Appearance

Earless monitor lizards have a cylindrical body, long neck, short limbs, long sharp claws, small eyes, semitransparent lower eyelids, and six longitudinal rows of strongly keeled scales. The upperparts are orangish-brown, and the underside is mottled dark brown and whitish, pale yellowish, ochre or rusty. The earless monitor lizard is a semiaquatic, brown lizard native to the Southeast Asian island of Borneo.

Range and habitat

The earless monitor lizard is endemic to the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where it is known from Sarawak in East Malaysia, as well as West and North Kalimantan in Indonesia. Until late 2012, its known range in North Kalimantan was a part of East Kalimantan. It was also confirmed to be found in Brunei for the first time in 2022, in the country's Temburong District.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Earless monitor lizards are generally strictly nocturnal animals, although exceptional daytime observations in the open have been reported. In captivity, they will eat fish (both whole and pieces), earthworms, squid, shrimp, tadpoles, yolk from green sea turtle eggs, pieces of pig and chicken liver, baby mice and mussels, but refuse to take bird eggs and legs of frog.

In captivity adults typically eat once or twice per week, but sometimes enter longer periods where they do not feed. Based on captive observations a pair will mate repeatedly over a period of a few months, with each session lasting for hours.

In crisis

The earless monitor lizard has been rated by the IUCN as endangered (its range covers less than 500 km2 or 190 mi2). About 100 museum specimens are known and most major natural history museums have one or more in their collection. In 2012 it was featured in a Japanese reptile keepers magazine and in the following years a larger number of individuals entered captivity.

As a precaution some scientists that have discovered individuals in the wild have refused to provide the exact location, only describing it in very broad terms, citing fears of alerting wildlife traders. In 2015, a smuggler was caught in an Indonesian airport with 8 individuals and in 2016 another was caught in an Indonesian airport with 17 individuals.

Earless monitor lizard is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Earless monitor lizard, Wikidata item Q904780. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.