The day before yesterday my neighbor called my name as he chased a 1-meter long monitor lizard under my sea front house. My neighbor Bow was a bit distressed, so I took a closer look. The monitor lizard was striped like a tiger! It was pretty small for a monitor lizard about 1 meter and very thin with a larger mouth. Bow, a local long tail guy said he had never seen one before. I had seen something like this in photos on a beach in Flores, Indonesia last year. Local legend has it, that there were small alligators in the waters in the huge mangroves forest near my house . Ive been told they have been extinct for 60 years or more. Any body seen anything like this here? We live in the South Andaman coast.

sorry i was too slow with my camera Thanks! HH

Don't know about where you live but my husband heard stories that crocs used to be in the mangrove swamps here on koh phangan when his parents were young. Considering his dad recalls seeing them as a young man, I take it as true.

Hi Sbk. I live in Krabi. and I heard the same from my neighbors. I think it could of been a croc- but it was very long and skinny. I ve seen plenty of monitors around. But nothing marked like this one.....

There is a very colorfully marked monitor lizard that lives here, my husband calls it the water monitor because, well, it lives in the water. The one that lives on the land is called the land monitor

Anyway, he said people used to hunt the water monitor for their skin, but that he thought it was now illegal.

Of course, with the massive influx of Isaan workers on the island over the past few years the local monitor population is being decimated

Ahh.. mans best friend...

This is a water monitor (albeit a particularly large one) but i wouldn't reccommend adopting this posture with one..

They're fairly common in the more wilder parts of Thailand, but if you go Lumphini Park in Bangkok there's a sizable population living around the ponds there & you can see them upclose.

We used to get big ones like that around our house, I've got to say. but, again, not anymore

thanks guys- yep, that looks like what i saw. we have the black ones everywhere here, but i've never seen the markings before and yes it was coming out of the water.