We desperately need your help. Although the other endangered monitor lizard (the famous Komodo dragon) has received vast amounts of funding to aid its conservation, the butaan has been almost entirely neglected. Just $10 will make a difference! Please consider helping us. We will acknowledge your support here and in subsequent publications and keep you informed of all developments.
We tape spool and line devices to butaan that have been caught and release them at the exact point of capture as soon as possible. Spool and line data gives us a detailed account of the animals' movementes for a few hours, days or weeks after release. We have also used spool and line very effectively on other animals, including the endemic Polillo forest snail Helicostyla portei.
An obligate frugivore is an animal whose diet throughout its range consist largely of fruit. Other obligate frugivores in the Philippines include flying foxes, hornbills and other birds. The butaan is much larger than any other obligate frugivore in the Philippines and had a much more restricted diet; on Polillo the diet of adult butaan consists almost entirely of eight species of fruits and two species of snails.
The best way to monitor individual butaan would be to extract DNA from fresh feces found on the forest floor. We can find the feces but we cannot afford the analysis!
Butaan jump from incredible heights, land on the ground
with a huge crash and walk away uninjured. Jumps to the ground from 30m were
recorded by Auffenberg and our spool and line tracking suggests lizards
regularly jump from heights of 4-15m when they are unmolested. The amazing
jumping power of the butaan is undocumented in any other monitors lizard and
may be one more unique aspects of the Putras Biawak group.
Practical Conservation for Neglected Species
We work with endangered and neglected people, wildlife and habitats, finding practical solutions to serious problems.
We use feces to investigate diet and activity areas of butaan. In total we have examined more than 1500 samples, possibly the largest ever collected for a single population of reptiles.
Butaan and their relatives are huge specialised frugivores, much bigger
than any other specialised frugivorous animal in the Philippines. They
need a constant supply of fruit but lack the wings that allow other
frugivores to forage in different forest fragments. Large and immobile,
the butaan depends on a very narrow range of foods.
Glauert's goanna is an elegant, rock-dwelling lizard with a very long tail and long limbs. Mertens described it from two specimens previously assigned to V.timorensis similis. This beautiful goanna is found only in the extreme north of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and also occurs on a number of islands off the coast...
Butaan Project 
We desperately need your help. Although the other endangered monitor lizard (the famous Komodo dragon) has received vast amounts of funding to aid its conservation, the butaan has been almost entirely neglected. Just $10 will make a difference! Please consider helping us. We will acknowledge your support here and in subsequent publications and keep you informed of all developments.
We tape spool and line devices to butaan that have been caught and release them at the exact point of capture as soon as possible. Spool and line data gives us a detailed account of the animals' movementes for a few hours, days or weeks after release. We have also used spool and line very effectively on other animals, including the endemic Polillo forest snail Helicostyla portei.
An obligate frugivore is an animal whose diet throughout its range consist largely of fruit. Other obligate frugivores in the Philippines include flying foxes, hornbills and other birds. The butaan is much larger than any other obligate frugivore in the Philippines and had a much more restricted diet; on Polillo the diet of adult butaan consists almost entirely of eight species of fruits and two species of snails.
The best way to monitor individual butaan would be to extract DNA from fresh feces found on the forest floor. We can find the feces but we cannot afford the analysis!
Butaan jump from incredible heights, land on the ground
with a huge crash and walk away uninjured. Jumps to the ground from 30m were
recorded by Auffenberg and our spool and line tracking suggests lizards
regularly jump from heights of 4-15m when they are unmolested. The amazing
jumping power of the butaan is undocumented in any other monitors lizard and
may be one more unique aspects of the Putras Biawak group.
Practical Conservation for Neglected Species
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