First thing first, the reason the adults look so dusty is because a lot of them don't have the right burrow access. Tegus need to be able to burrow in substrate that holds humidity, and a lot of them don't get it. The b/ws don't get so dry-looking because of the dark pigment, it hides a multitude of sins.
Second thing second, taming them does work just like the b/ws. There's no one right way to do it- and the Reptifiles taming page is a great place to start! Go slow, be gentle, and god, if you have a male, target train him early. I know we have mixed feelings about Clint these days, but his tegu target training video explains exactly why you gotta target train the big boys. Those jaw muscles are not a joke. (You should target train the girls too, tegus are smart and respond well to training. Good mental stimulation!)
But onto the knowledge-production problem that is Salvator rufescens. This is going to be long and rambly and frustrated.
The red tegu is a conundrum of an animal in captivity. We have way less info on them because when people were figuring out how to keep these things alive, they were doing it to commercially raise b/ws, and so they paid attention to what the b/ws were doing. (A lot of our basic husbandry data comes out of the initial American importers, who got them from farms in South America where they're raised and hunted for the leather trade.)
Reds don't have nearly the commercial use, nor nearly the scientific interest, and so overall we know less about them. We have so much good info out there about wild diets and nutrition and behavioral ecology... for the b/ws. For the reds? There is ONE behavioral ecology paper about them. ONE. They also aren't doing the invasive thing the way the b/ws are, so there's less interest in studying them. I know Rachel Pikstein's lab is working up rufescens genetics for a study, but that's not super helpful for care!
There are a lot of people doing interesting things with tegus and talking about it online... but they're almost always doing it with black and whites, or hybrids. Even on Tegu Talk, the big old tegu forum that, like all forums, is mostly dead these days, you'll see that b/ws are the hot topic, not reds.
And while a red tegu will certainly survive and be healthy within b/w parameters- they live in the same regions and even hybridize in the wild- it's obvious that there are some differences. But what those differences are, and how they work with keeping the animal in better conditions... honestly it's a bit of a crapshoot.
Laura Roberts is one of the best people to ask about reds, but unfortunately her website is gone, and I'm not sure how much she's around anymore; she comments in the FB groups, but she's a Floridian, and it's illegal to keep them there anymore, so I don't think she's still breeding. Her tegu fb page hasn't updated since 2021, but you can use the Wayback Machine to access Your Tegu.
I'm trying to think of who else works with reds and puts husbandry stuff out there, but most of them are just... gone now. Rose City Reptiles is a breeder who sometimes does husbandry videos, but they've got outside enclosures/access, so not necessarily the typical pet home.
What I like to do whenever I'm trying to figure out my parameters for cage environment is I go look at the weather in different spots in the native range and see what it's doing.
But that doesn't help you at all with diet. We "know" they're a little more herbivorous in the wild, but that comes from one study from 1998 (Colli et al.) and it only looked at stomach contents, which are really not the best way to do a dietary study- stomach contents only tell you what's in the stomach at time of death, and if you're a scavenger, what you eat changes on a day to day basis. Also, n=5. They had 5 red tegus in their study. That's... not a lot.
Anyways of the modern diet stuff- the fruit consumption papers, the isotopic analyses and stomach content analyses to look at what they're eating when they're invasive, it's all black and whites.
So what do you do in this situation? Me, I find the healthiest-looking animals I can and find out what their keepers are doing. I usually stick to facebook for this because for most of the people who know what they're doing with tegus... they're not on other social media. Except maybe old forums. The fb group Tegu Keepers has a lot of wisdom, as does Tegus From Around The World. I look at what works for individual keepers, and I'm always interested in the value of past experiences. Even if the past practices are not what I'd do, and they often aren't, understanding the thought process is important. I also look up as much as I can- climate data, and what biology articles exist. I gather up all the information that I can, and I never use just one source, and I never listen to just one person.
I'm sorry I couldn't give you more of a concrete answer- maybe that'll change one day, I know a couple of people working on an actual book about tegus like we have books for monitors (not like those pet guides, more like a book about the natural history of Tupinambis and Salvator in general). But for now, we wait.
Some papers that might be worth reading:
A New Species of Tupinambis (Squamata: Teiidae) from Central Brazil, with an Analysis of Morphological and Genetic Variation in the Genus. Guarino R. Colli, Ayrton K. Péres, Jr., Hélio J. da Cunha
Herpetologica, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 477-492 (16 pages)
This one's on JStor, but fair warning it's a mess. It was written before Tupinambis and Salvator were split, and like I said, there's issues with the study methods for making any dietary assumptions about the reds.
Activity and Ranging Behavior of the Red Tegu Lizard Tupinambis rufescens in the Bolivian Chaco. Rossy R. Montaño, Rosa Leny Cuéllar, Lee A. Fitzgerald , Florencio Mendoza, Filemó
Soria, Christine V. Fiorello, Sharon L. Deem, and Andrew J. Noss
South American Journal of Herpetology, 8(2):81-88.
The single behavioral ecology study. It doesn't talk about specific diet, but it can give you an example of their home range and temperatures. Tag me in the responses if you have a hard time getting it, the easiest way to access it is on Academia.edu.
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