Reptilia · Squamata
Varanus flavescensHardwicke & Gray, 1827
Yellow Monitor
Photograph by Soumya Patra, CC BY-SA, via iNaturalist
A ground-dwelling, day-active, meat-eating monitor lizard from the Oriental region, reaching 515 mm snout to vent.
Reptilia › Squamata › Varanidae › Varanus
- Grows to
- 515mm
- greatest recorded
- Eats
- Carnivorous
- Active
- Diurnal
- Lives up to
- 10.5years
Longer than 61% of all monitor lizards anyone has measured.
The bar is the rank itself: its length is the share of the family this animal exceeds. The chart below is the family’s real spread, on a logarithmic scale because body length here runs from 116.4 to 1,570 mm. The solid rule is this animal. Every bar is a count of real species, and nothing on this figure is estimated.
What is known
42 sourced facts, each taken from a named scientific dataset. How to read these.
Cited from a dataset unless a row is marked otherwise.
Standing in the world
- Still living
- Extant
- Conservation status
- Endangered
- Status assessed · the year the Red List last looked
- 2019
- Population trend
- Decreasing
- Red List criteria
- A2cd
The animal itself
- Limbs
- Four legs
- Fangs
- None
- Longest recorded life
- 10.5years
Schleich and Kastle 2002: more than 10 years; Slavens and Slavens 1999: 4 and 6 months; 10 and 6 months (King & Green 1999, Mendyk 2015)
Size
- Length snout to vent · greatest recorded
- 515mm20.5 in
- Length snout to vent · adult female mean
- 332.2mm13 in
- Largest female · snout to vent
- 332.2mm13 in
- Hatchling length · snout to vent
- 70.8mm2.75 in
- Largest juvenile · snout to vent
- 70.8mm2.75 in
- Body mass · greatestcomputed
- 2962.8g6.5 lb
- Body mass at hatchingmeasured
- 7g0.25 oz
max 515 mm SVL (Feldman et al. 2016)
snout-vent length; the source column mixes this with straight carapace length
computed from length by a family-level allometric equation, not weighed
How it lives
- Diet
- Carnivorous
- How it hunts
- Active foraging
- Active
- Diurnal
- Where it lives
- Terrestrial
- Habitat
- Grassland, Wetlands
- Biome
- Tropical & Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forests
- Active season · months of the year
- 9months
- Region
- Oriental
- Mainland or island
- Mainland
- Elevation · above sea level
- 100–320m
- Range size
- 883,901km²
- Density
- 0–0.18per hectare
- Home range · largest recorded
- 750m2
Vertebrates and invertebrates, crabs, insects, earthworms, fish, frogs and frog eggs, turtle & lizard eggs, birds and bird eggs & rodents (Kastle et al. 2013), amphibians and eggs of reptiles (Bennett 1995), juvenile monitor (Chaudhuri and Chowdhury 2018), "mainly arthropods, also amphibians, fish, mammals and birds (Rahman and Rakhimov 2019), "feeds mainly on frogs and their eggs and the eggs of liz-ards, turtles and birds, as well as mammals and insects" (Auliya and Koch 2020)
e.g., Kastle et al. 2013, Rahman and Rakhimov 2019
e.g., Chaudhuri and Chowdhury 2018, Rahman and Rakhimov 2019, Auliya and Koch 2020, Singh et al. 2021
(e.g., Auliya and Koch 2020)/semi aquatic (Rahman and Rakhimov 2019)
max 316 (Kastle et al. 2013)
Breeding
- Reproduction
- Oviparous
- Average clutch
- 12.25eggs
- Eggs or young per clutch
- 4–30eggs
- Mean clutch
- 8.5–16eggs
- Clutches in a year
- 1per year
- Clutches a year
- 1per year
- First breeds at
- 30–48months
mean 16 (Du et al. 2014, Bennett 1995), max 30 (e.g., Bennett 1995), 4-30 (Auliya and Koch 2020)
Naming and history
- Suborder
- Sauria
- Infraorder
- Anguimoprha
- Subspecies
- No
- Described by
- Hardwicke & Gray
- Moved to another genus · since it was first described
- Yes
- Described in
- 1827
- Type locality
- India
Keeping one
Yellow Monitor is assessed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Species at risk in the wild are often covered by CITES and by national law, which decide what may be bought, sold, moved across a border or kept at all — and captive-bred and wild-caught animals are usually treated differently. Check the rules where you are before acquiring one. Nothing below is a judgement about keeping this species; it is what a published welfare standard says about space, and what the animal itself was measured doing.
6 ft 9 in × 6 ft 9 in × 4 ft 3 in(206 × 206 × 129 cm)
Minimum length × width × height, for one animal. Bigger is always better.
The standard sizes ground-dwelling species at 4 × 4 × 2.5 times snout-vent length.
Mindestanforderungen an die Haltung von Reptilien (Sachverständigengutachten), German Federal Ministry for Nutrition, Agriculture and Forestry, Animal Welfare Division, 10 January 1997. The standard states these floor areas are recommendations rather than binding limits.
From this animal’s own snout-vent length of 20.5 in (515 mm), at 4 × 4 × 2.5 times it, following the German federal welfare standard — how this is worked out.
No preferred body temperature has been recorded for Yellow Monitor. Rather than repeat a number from a care sheet, this page leaves it out.
Feeding
A prey item should be no wider than the space between the animal's eyes.
Widely used across reptile husbandry references. The stated reason is that the gap approximates the width of the throat, so wider prey is associated with impaction. This is established practice, not a measurement.
239kJ per day
Worked out for an animal of 2,963 g, the heaviest recorded for Yellow Monitor — so it is the top of the range, not a figure for a particular animal. Weigh yours and the number will be lower.
An upper estimate, not a feeding target, and not veterinary advice. The equation covers only what an animal burns staying alive, so a growing, gravid or recovering animal needs more — and it was measured on wild animals, which move far more than one in an enclosure. Body condition and a vet who knows the species are what a feeding decision should rest on. Where this comes from.
What nobody knows
These are not gaps in our research. No scientific dataset records them for this species — and saying so is information you cannot get from a reference that simply leaves a field out.
- — Length snout to vent · adult male mean
- — Length snout to vent · adult mean
- — Length nose to tail · greatest recorded
- — Female length · mean, nose to tail
- — Length nose to tail · adult male mean
- — Length nose to tail · adult mean
- — Largest male · snout to vent
- — Largest female · shell length
- — Largest male · shell length
- — Hatchling length · nose to tail
- — Largest juvenile · shell length
- — Egg length
- — Egg width
- — Body mass · a typical adult
- — Body mass · adult female, mean
- — Preferred body temperature · chosen in a laboratory gradient
- — Body temperature when active · measured in the wild
- — Eats arthropods
- — Eats vertebrates
- — Eats plant matter
- — How the young develop
- — Gestation or incubation
- — Hatchling length · smallest recorded
- — Hatchling length · largest recorded
- — Age at first breeding · female
- — Mature from · youngest recorded
- — Mature by · oldest recorded
- — Size at maturity · smallest recorded
- — Size at maturity · largest recorded
- — Venomous
- — Body temp in the wild · lowest mean recorded
- — Body temp in the wild · highest mean recorded
- — Colour on the back
- — Pattern on the back
- — Pupil
- — Sex decided by
- — Active in
Others in Varanidae
Take this data
Everything on this page is available as data under CC BY 4.0 — use it freely, credit it, no permission needed.
This species as JSON · the whole dataset
Cite this page
The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia (2026). Varanus flavescens. Retrieved 2026-09-08, from https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/varanus-flavescens
@misc{varanus_flavescens_2026,
title = {Varanus flavescens},
author = {{The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/varanus-flavescens}
}Sources
- Meiri, S. (2024). SquamBase — a database of squamate (Reptilia: Squamata) traits. Global Ecology and Biogeography. Public domain (CC0).
- Oskyrko, O. et al. (2024). ReptTraits: a comprehensive dataset of ecological traits in reptiles. Scientific Data. Used under CC BY 4.0.
- Catalogue of Life (dataset 3LR), used under CC BY.