The water monitor, Varanus salvator has been exploited for its skin to supply international demands for reptile leather, whereas meat, liver, and fat are consumed locally in some communities in North Sumatra. Demands for skin seems to be paralleled with meat consumption in this province for more than 25 years. We conducted direct interviews with hunters and collecting managers in five abattoirs in five towns in North Sumatra to obtain preliminary data on consumption and trade of Water monitor. Additionally, we explore the association between consumption, trade, and livelihood of rural communities. We found that lizards of all sizes were taken and processed in the abattoirs for skin and meat trade. Consumption of Water monitor meat in North Sumatra is partially driven by a cultural background and has been occurring probably longer than the skin trade for leather industry. We noted that meat of Water monitor also becomes an alternative protein source because of its lower price. In conclusions, benefits of Water monitor harvest are extended across levels of participants in the local trade, including hunters, collectors, and meat consumers. Meat consumption and skin trade are closely linked with one another in North Sumatra; nevertheless sustainability of the trade needs to be evaluated in the near future to predict demands and production capacity.

Local knowledge on the benefits of wild meat is probably the motivation behind consumption of such unusual source of protein. Various tribes in Indonesia are known to include wild meat of monitor lizards, Varanus spp. in their diet for several reasons including health benefits. Water monitor, Varanus salvator, is widely distributed across the Indonesian Archipelago and commonly found even in degraded habitats. Meat and internal organs of this species are commonly known to be consumed in Indonesia by at least three ethnics, i.e. Batak on Sumatra, Dayak on Kalimantan, and Minahasa on Sulawesi islands. We aim to investigate consumption of water monitor meat in a few communities in the western part of Java, where there is likely a custom albeit benign. Previous observations in the province of West Java showed consumption of a smaller scope in Sundanese communities, where religious background is of a restriction. Consumption of water monitor meat all over on Java seemed to be infrequent, yet also prevailing at a level of small business. In the western part of Java, consumption and sales seemed to be dominant in the northern areas, but mostly in Jakarta than in the regencies of West Java province. Direct observations and casual interviews with a few associates in West Java revealed a long-term practice in Cibinong. Besides its gastronomic benefit, meat of water monitor is believed as health tonic for men and a therapeutic method to treat skin diseases.

The exponential growth of the human population in the last few decades has had an impact on the exponential increase of agricultural land. One of the consequences arising from the forest land conversions is the increasing number of conflicts between wildlife and humans. Although human-wildlife conflicts are also common in Indonesia, efforts to inventory and monitor the types of conflicts and their distribution are still limited. Mammals and birds are the only two groups of wildlife that are widely studied. This study tries to collect data on the incidences of human-water monitor interactions that are often reported by online news. The collection of news from online media (web scraping) is done automatically using the python package GoogleNews. The collected news articles were stored in a spreadsheet format and processed to obtain information on the location and type of conflict. The scraping process collected 1,838 news articles related to water monitors that represented 189 cases of human-water monitor conflicts. However, there were only 172 conflict cases that had detailed information of the location. The spatial autocorrelation analysis revealed a significant clustering pattern in the Jakarta Metropolitan area. The most common incident was water monitors coming into a house or neighborhood. The reports also uncovered that at least eight people lost their lives and seven water monitors were killed or sold. In addition, there were about 81 captured water monitors with uncertain or untraceable status. Commercially harvesting water monitors, particularly in highly urbanized cities, can be a reasonable solution for this problem.