As you all know about a year ago we fell in love with the Cuban false chameleon
And we bought a breeding group. We have a male and two females. They're all breeding size. They're very- well
Not very active. Right now, they're active but they are usually a very calm species of anole.
They're not actually a type of chameleon as you can see they don't have the mitten feet. They have individual toes
We used to think they were a type of chameleon because their eyes can move independently of one another
But they are in fact a species of anole just like the cuban knight anole and like brown anoles that you see at pet
Stores they fall under the same family
but the Cuban false chameleon or bearded anole they're sometimes called is the calmest out of the entire family of
lizards there and
They're awesome lizards. They're very handleable. They're chill as you can see. I'm pretty sure this group
Was wild caught I'm not positive
But we got them with the intention of breeding them in captivity so that we can produce captive-bred
Specimens instead of more being taken from the wild. And we were successful.
We have an adorable little baby and I want to introduce you to her today.
Today's video about our false chameleons is sponsored by audible. We're getting a lot of snow up here in the Midwest
So I use audible a lot when I'm shoveling the driveway.
And... play. Time to shovel this...sidewalk. Whoa...
Nope!
Not doing that! Ed?
I use audible when I clean my snake enclosures
I'm currently re-listening to 'The Reptile Room,' which I find appropriate when I'm in my reptile room
and I like comparing my snakes to the characters in the book.
Are you the incredibly deadly Viper?
(Snake noises)
'A Series of Unfortunate Events' isn't just for kids.
I still think it's a fun, quick read.
You can get the reptile room audiobook for free by going to audible.com/snakediscovery
Or by texting SNAKEDISCOVERY to 500-500.
There's also a link in the description.
If you don't like it,
You can cancel at any time, but you still get to keep the audiobooks that you downloaded.
Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. You can use Audible to learn a new skill, find a new fitness routine,
listen to a book before its movie comes out, or just have something fun in the background to listen to while you're doing chores like
Taking care of your animals like I do.
Again, just go to audible.com/snake discovery or text SNAKEDISCOVERY to 500-500 to get your free book today.
It doesn't have to be the reptile room, of course.
It can be whichever audio book in their library you want you can get it for free using that link
So thank you again, Audible for sponsoring today's episode, and I think it's time for you to meet their baby.
You ready for this? This is one of the females.
I don't know if it's the mom or not since we have them together
But there's a chance that she is and I have her with to show you the size difference
Eugh, that lock is so tough!
And in here is the little baby! Come here!
Check it out! There she is!
Here is our first baby false chameleon. She is so cute. Love this little girl
We know this is a female because you can actually sex them as soon as they come out of the egg.
The males have a pair of enlarged scales near the base of their tail.
We did hatch two baby false chameleons - one male and one female.
This one was not very happy when she came out of the egg, but she has since calmed down.
After reading an article of another breeder who feeds his babies three times a week,
That's what I had been doing for a while, but it just didn't seem like enough
so I've actually bumped up her feeding to once a day with the occasional day skipped and that seems to be a better rate for her.
We're feeding this little girl
crickets and pieces of snails
We're also giving her dubia roaches
and we're dusting her food every other every third feeding or so just to make sure she gets enough calcium and vitamins in her system
To feed her since she's kind of a picky eater, I kind of have to
Sneak in the first insect or a piece of snail and then after she starts eating, she takes it down just fine and she chews
It up on her own, but then I kind of conveyor belt sneak in more food as she opens her mouth
I've used this technique before on snakes and it works really well because once they've already started eating they don't know the difference
Between one food item and another and they just keep on going.
So to feed them, what I've been doing is I'll take an appropriately sized chunk of snail. This isn't for her
This is for the adult and then I actually mist it down
With water and then I dip it into the calcium where the multi vitamin vitamin powder and then it's both
Hydrated gives them some water and it's dusted
Then the adults are Tong trained so they know what this means
You can do it, that's a pretty big chunk
But because of their big heads they can actually handle pretty large pieces of food. Does she ever remind you of a pelican?
Ed: A little bit.
Check this out though
This is the can of snails that I use. Don't those look like mushrooms to you?
Like, I'm pretty sure you could trick someone into eating these by saying they were mushrooms.
And we have her set up in kind of
A similar enclosure as what the parents are in just kind of a more tropical setup
I actually covered up the vents on the side to try to hold in humidity a bit better
Her substrate is a mixture of sphagnum moss and eco earth and she has all sorts of things to climb on.
They of course like to wrap their bodies around twigs and branches and
Thinner branches than you would expect for the size of lizards that they are so she has kind of these thinner
branches up here which is where she spends a lot of her time basking under and her lights
Consist of a basking light and then a UVB light, although I need to get a new one
That's not as long fits in that. Don't worry
I just need to get a bigger dome but it works for now and at least gets her her UVB that she needs
I initially gave her some manzanita branches, but she seemed to be slipping and sliding on them
So to assist in her getting a good grip on her branches, I wrapped them in Vet Wrap
I've used this trick for birds before. It works like a charm and just like our other critters with a
tropical humidity retaining substrate we have springtails in the eco earth and
Sphagnum moss mix so that they can help break down waste products. To help with humidity, I'm dumping in water
Occasionally to keep that bedding moist and then also kind of misting her down too
Now, this is our first time breeding false chameleons. And from what I've read
It does take babies a while to start drinking from a spray bottle, but they do after a little bit
So I'm still trying to kind of train her drink from this bottle as well as eat from the tweezers
We- although we had around a dozen eggs from these guys, we unfortunately were only able to hatch two babies successfully.
I'm not sure if that's because it was their first year breeding for us
which it was their first year so that could definitely play a big part in it, or maybe our temperature,
our incubation temperature or humidity levels were off. I've done the research and it I thought we had everything
to the T
But I think what we'll do next year is we're going to - or this year, rather - we're going to when they start laying eggs again
Do a little experiment and we're going to separate their eggs into small batches and incubate those batches at different- slightly different
Temperature and humidity levels to see what works best. There's unfortunately not a ton of information on how to breed these guys out there
so we may have to do some experimentation of our own to see what's most
Successful and then hopefully we can figure out
What the ideal temps and humidity levels are so that we can have all sorts of babies in the future.
Another thing I love about the false chameleon is that their tails look like dinosaur tails.
But it seems to be more prominent in the babies compared to the adults
the babies also have this cute like
shortened snout that elongates as they mature and get older the other baby that we hatched last season was
The male and that one we did re-home to Chad. If you're watching this. I hope he's still doing well!
Sounds like he is! We decided to keep or hold back this
Female baby so that we can raise her up and use her in breeding in the future
So the end goal is once she's big enough to move out of this little enclosure
We can move her into the big enclosure with the rest of the adults, but she'd probably be food for them right now
So we're keeping them separated while she's small. So there you go
Here's our newest little baby Cuban false chameleon also known as a bearded anole. We were so excited that we got her!
Again, we're kind of bummed that we didn't have more success in the breeding season
But again, it's- it's always a learning process when it comes to reptiles especially species that are not often raised in captivity
So we hope to learn more each year so we could have more and more successful breeding seasons with this species
And we're so happy to be working with them. Thank you for watching this video and meeting our newest baby.
We need name ideas, by the way. Also. Thank you to the patreon supporters for backing our Channel and we'll see you next time!