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Blue-tongue Skink | Shingleback Skink | Gila Monster | Water Monitor | Green Tree Monitor
Alert and intelligent, equipped with keen senses and saberlike teeth, Water Monitors are extreme carnivores.
These long forks make the monitor's tongue one of its most powerful tools for hunting. How? By providing directional cues. If the left fork picks up more of a prey animal's scent than the right, for example, the lizard will move to the left.
Many squamates, including monitors and snakes, flick their tongues to sample the surroundings for chemical compounds. They transfer those chemicals to sensors—called vomeronasal organs—in the roof of the mouth. Monitors have the longest tongues of any limbed lizard that uses its tongue to detect scents.
These strong, curved claws can tear flesh and inflict fearsome wounds. Water Monitors eat only meat and sometimes tackle prey nearly their own size.
The bowed legs are powerful, and the Water Monitor is very fast for its size. Speed, endurance and the intelligence to outwit prey animals make it a dangerous predator.
All monitors are about the same shape and proportion as this one—but some are much smaller, others much bigger. At one end of the scale there's a 20 centimeter (nine inch) Short-tailed Goanna; at the other, the three meter (10 foot) Komodo Dragon. Megalania, an extinct monitor, grew to six meters (20 feet) or more.
Water Monitors like the one on display make this noise when disturbed.
