Today we're going to talk about the care for Veiled Chameleons.
They're actually called Veiled Chameleons because they have a little veil on their head.
So coloring with the chameleons, the female is going to stay around a green
to brown, the male's going to usually color out in pretty patterns that
are orange and yellow and green. They come from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, so they are
a little bit more of a desert species of chameleon, that's why you're only gonna
want to spray them once a day. They get about 16 to 20 inches. The males will
generally get a little bit bigger than the females. They usually live around 6
to 8 years. A female chameleon might have a little
bit shorter of a lifespan, because even without a male, they do produce
unfertile eggs and that can take away from their life. We recommend the minimum cage
for them is going to be 30 inches by 30 inches by 16 inches. Right here we
have 36 by 36 by 18, so you can see we have some variation, you can go higher than
that, of course. We never put a chameleon in a glass cage because the screen cage
will increase air circulation, and they really need to keep the air constantly circulated. Along with
increasing air circulation, you also want to constantly keep the air circulated to
kind of dissipate all the humidity from spraying them. Although they do need to
be sprayed heavily, they also need to be drying out the tank actively, just
so you don't get any build up of moisture, anything like that. So the
chameleon is going to need two different bulbs, a heat and a UVB.
You can do a strip UVB or just a light fixture UVB. They need to sit around
100 degrees basking, so on this specific tank we have a 100 watt basking lamp.
It's really good to create a lot of areas for your chameleon to climb, so
that they can kind of choose where they want to stay with the temperature, if
they want to stay close to the light or farther away. We use a mixture of Jungle
Mix or Reptisoil, along with Repti Bark for our chameleons.
We spray the Veiled Chameleons once a day with water, give them a good soak
with it. You don't want to do more than once, because they are from the desert so
they don't need that much humidity, but they can not see standing water, so a
water bowl won't be used by them. They can really only see water when it's
moving, and they actively feel the change in humidity in the air. We use a lot of
climbing decorations, as you see we fill up the whole tank with grape vine,
iguana branches, and such. This just provides a lot of space for them to be
climbing and surface area, so they can move up that gradient and down the
temperature gradient. As well as, we put some fake plants, you can do real plants
in there if you want to try it. It's just so it kind of has more surface area
for the misting to be on there, so they can lick the water up. Veiled Chameleons
are actually omnivores, so they are going to eat vegetation, meaning mustard greens,
turnip greens, and stuff like that. But they won't eat fruit, because that can
cause mouth rot in them, so you want to stay away from those sugary fruits and
stuff like that, but they do like greens. And then they are gonna eat a lot of
crickets, insects, mealworms, wax worms, stuff like that. These guys do need a
calcium supplement, you can put that right on to their crickets,
whenever you give them to them before that, and that kind of just helps them
metabolize and absorb their UVB correctly. Once a week we do give our
Veiled Chameleons vitamin dust, it's basically just like a multivitamin that
you would take every morning, but for them it can help them color out, as well
as grow as much as they can. Chameleons aren't really the most handleable
reptiles by far, but you can tame them down potentially. They generally get
stressed out easily by a lot of handling though, so we'd recommend leaving them
alone for a majority of the time. Okay, she's gonna
scoop them up onto her hand there, and they love to climb so you gotta always keep
your hands positioned for them to climb. So yeah, she didn't grab them, she just kind of
scooped them up in her hand there. And then this guy is shedding, as you see they have pretty
cool little hands. You've gotta make sure they're not gonna fall obviously, but
they have the little hands and their eyes, they move in different directions, which
is also really cool about them. As you can see they do have that veil that we
mentioned earlier. That's cool and so you just keep your hands cupped and let them -
you just don't like grab them or anything. Yeah, they are really fragile and
they stress out easily as we had said earlier as well, so. Just keep enough
surface area for them to climb on, making sure that they're not gonna make any big
leaps or anything. They can move fast even though they seem like they're kind of
slow. Oh, now he's - yeah, he doesn't, they don't like cameras. Definitely not. But
he's standing up really tall, so I'll kinda move out, but he's actually not that bad
colored. If they're really stressed out they would turn that, like really dark, with
black spots all over.
So if you ever own a Veiled Chameleon, their daily care is gonna be doing that
heavy spraying in the morning or evening, whatever time you guys you decide on,
and then you're going to want to spot clean for poops and other fallen food or
dead crickets. On top of that, you're going to want to change all the greens
put in new greens, as well as throwing in some crickets, or putting in
some worms for them to eat. The babies will generally eat about a dozen and a
half, all the adults will eat about a dozen crickets a day.