Lighting Requirements for a Water Monitor

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to talk about lighting. Water monitors are scavengers and they eat anything that they can find and some people say they don't necessarily need UVA as well as B. What we do is we like to give ours UVA and B which comes from a self mercury bulb. This is 125 watt bulb which is not too hot for this 10 gallon tank and we're going to put that in this clamp and we're going to put that over half of the tank. The other half of the tank is going to be covered with tape to keep the humidity in and this is going to tend to dry out the tank a little bit. What we're going to want to do is we're going to want to spray them or even just pour a cup of water into the tank everyday plus he's still going to have a nice big water bowl to swim around in. So this is a self mercury vapor bulb and that is going to take care his heat and his light, he's going to want 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night time; that's very important too. You can't just have the light on 24/7 that will upset his schedule and he won't want too eat well. The other thing you can do is if you have a big cage, if you made a custom cage like almost a room size cage, you can get track lighting from Home Depot. The track lighting you can put various lights in. You can adjust them into different areas and you can heat up a rock or a log or anything you want. The monitor will come and go as he pleases to go in and out of his heat."