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The author, Bill Strand, with a Furcifer oustaleti chameleon in Madagascar.

How to use wild data in chameleon husbandry

Gathering husbandry data from the wild is critical for chameleon husbandry. But we need to apply it with caution. We are going to review why wild data is necessary, how it can be dangerous, and how to apply it effectively.

Note: This topic is discussed in the weekly Chameleon Academy Newsletter and is reviewed in a Saturday Chameleon Workshop on YouTube. Click here to join in with the weekly newsletter discussions: Chameleon Academy Newsletter sign up

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Parson's Chameleon sitting on a branch

Wild data is important for chameleon husbandry!

It may seem strange to some of you that I have to state the obvious, but believe me, it is necessary. When we bring a chameleon into our homes we are taking on the responsibility of providing for them the habitat and environment they evolved millions of years to be perfectly suited for. On each trip I take to Madagascar I see chameleons with battle scars and rehabilitating injuries. I have seen missing limbs and missing eyes. And these chameleons are still trucking along. They are hardy things! So, this concept of chameleons are fragile is more an embarrassing report on our husbandry than it is on the hardiness of chameleons. And if we want to improve our husbandry we are flying blind if we do not go to their homeland and learn how they were designed to live.  Now, not all of us can travel the world, but the internet is a big place and we can find someone who has been to the area we could ask for first hand accounts.

You might wonder who in the world would think that we don’t need to go to nature to find data to use for our husbandry. Strangely enough there are social media groups that believe that once chameleons come into our homes that all rules of nature are off and since they are in captivity everything is different. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it, and it is, but it is depressingly easy to find groups like this. Be careful out there! Just because a group is big doesn’t mean it knows what it is talking about!

But there is also a more subtle mainstream trap. And that is believing you are tapping into natural data by watching Youtube videos or reading about it. To be sure, watching videos and reading may be the best you can do if you can’t travel. But the problem is that there is a certain bias in the videos you see and read. You are making an interpretation off of the videographer’s decision as to what to show you.

For example, how many of you think that Veiled Chameleons come from dry, arid areas of low humidity  and high UVB? Those thoughts came, in part, from YouTube videos and pictures showing Veiled Chameleons in very open branches trees and even on dead branches on a desolate land. And this formed some of the impressions of early Facebook admins who passed on their interpretations of what this material told them as proper husbandry. Here’s the problem. Photographers often move their subjects to an area where they can be seen with better contrast. And both videographers and photographers tend to see the chameleons that are out in the open for whatever reason, and we do not have all the ones hidden to balance out the observation. This is important when you are trying to determine UVB exposure from images or videos. If this media is all you have then that is better than just making things up. But, to really use this material, you need first hand eye-witnesses to give you a context in which the content was produced.

In the case of Veiled Chameleon husbandry, I did a research project on the Chameleon Academy Podcast where I interviewed herpetoculturists who had been in Yemen, the home of the Veiled Chameleon, themselves and observed the chameleons themselves. One of them had been there multiple times in both wet and dry seasons. And, in these first hand, eye witness accounts a completely different picture was painted. Veiled chameleons lives in lush, humid oasises that popped up in mountain valleys during the wet season. They spent most of their day hidden in the leaves where they were difficult to spot (and thus photograph). So you can start to see how it would be easy to base husbandry on the fringe cases that could be photographed rather than the majority of cases which were hard to photograph. And you can see how easy it would be to show the images as proof and lead a whole generation of keepers down the wrong path. And, if you think I am exaggerating, just ask yourself how many of you or your friends believe that Veiled Chameleons are a high UVB species. Bad information shouted through a digital megaphone stays around for years. This is why it is so important to regularly challenge everything you think is true.

And, if you have Veiled chameleons or simply would enjoy hearing a comprehensive interview check out the podcast episodes I have singled out on the Veiled Chameleon profile . This is the research and investigation I had to do because there is no way I would be able to get to the civil war torn area where Veiled Chameleons live naturally. The advantage of having an investigative podcast is that you don’t even have to believe anything I say. I have it published so you can go straight to the source material and evaluate it yourself. I gathered all the episodes and material on Veiled Chameleons into one species profile on the website so you don’t have to do searches in the podcast library.

Now, talking to first hand witnesses is as close to being there are most us of can manage. These interviews are an invaluable resource. But it is still worth going yourself for first hand experiences. Because, the most valuable take-aways are often hard to put into words. I got back less than a week ago from a trip to Madagascar with James Cross who has a special interest in hydration methods. We talked long about how we could recreate the high humidity we were experiencing. It didn’t have the stuffiness we often experience when we create high humidity in captivity. We knew we were talking about the same feeling because we were both there feeling it together. But I can’t imagine how either one of us will be able to effectively communicate the full feeling to someone who wasn’t there. What will happen next is that James and I will experiment to put together a system we can implement in our cages for husbandry that gets us a step closer to what we felt. In this way, our experiences can benefit the entire community. And we, as a community, take a step forward.

Juvenile Calumma brevicorne chameleon in the leaves

The dangers of wild data for chameleons in captivity

All data from the natural world is not gold though. That may surprise you coming from a guy who has spent his entire chameleon husbandry career talking about how we need to get our husbandry as close to natural as possible. While the concept is correct, there are two main dangers with execution. The first is measuring the wrong number and the second is idolizing the number as the single truth. I will explain.

The first caution we need to take is to realize there are a lot of numbers we can measure in nature that have varying degrees of relevance to our husbandry. Just take a look at the landscape of Madagascar and you see a myriad of temperature and humidity readings whether you are above the canopy, outside the forest, inside a tangled bush, or deep into the depths of the forest. There are a multitude of microclimates a chameleon can choose from and the microclimate they choose changes based on whether they have warmed up, gotten enough UVB, or are curious as to what is going on in the neighboring field. So, which number do you think the weather station feeding the app on your phone is giving you?

This is critical to consider because, in captivity, we drastically reduce the microclimates we offer our chameleon. We are giving the standard 2x2x4’ cage which, if we do our job right, contains a handful of microclimates. And, if we do our job right, those three or four microclimates are specifically chosen to be the idealized husbandry pockets that will provide our chameleon with what he needs to live a long healthy life. So you see how important it is that we select those few microclimates strategically.

For example, if we take the temperature outside the forest of 90 F and implement that in our 2x2x4 enclosures without the gradients and microclimates that come with the forest canopy, we will kill our chameleon. The dense shade of the forest canopy can create microclimates in the mid 70s F. And this is where the chameleon thrives. The temperature data comes to us without the critical context that it is the highest level of the temperature gradient and that the chameleon rarely, if ever, willingly exposes themselves to it.

Another common example of this is when UV Index data is taken in the area of the chameleon without regard for the chameleon’s behavior. The UVI could easily be read as UVI 13 when the chameleons in the area are hiding in the dense foliage at UVI 0. So, implementing the very natural UVI 13 levels in a cage would subject your chameleon to a top cage space which is un inhabitable. Here is where we need to be smart about when we measure the levels. We have to wait until the chameleon is actually basking and trying to absorb sunlight. And then, once we have that number we need to test it in our cages, watch behavior, and monitor physical clues as to whether the chameleon is getting what they need.

The second caution with using natural data is that we can end up reducing the wide range of natural conditions to one number. Once a temperature or humidity or UV Index number is presented to an online group as having been taken from the exact branch the chameleon was sitting on it can easily become the one number to rule them all. This is a main reason why I am so hesitant to take data from the wild and publish it. If it is not published in the context of the gradient present or in the ebb and flow of the entire 24 hour period, the data point, valid as it may be, may be elevated beyond what it should and be held as the one true parameter. I remember a case like this where someone who fancied themselves a scientist showed a picture of a solar meter reading UVI 13 standing by a bush where a carpet chameleon was found. This simple, horribly misguided picture could have easily started the social media echo chambers saying that carpet chameleons require a UVI of 13. The truth is that they would be hiding away from the noon day sun and highest levels of UVB. You cannot pull a chameleon from inside a bush and decide the noon day UVB reading is what the chameleon should get for 12 hours a day in a small cage. Implementing this in the size of cages carpet chameleons are generally kept would be a serious risk to their health and life. Misinformation travels extremely fast in our social media world and is surprisingly hard to uproot once it has taken hold.

A Calumma crypticum chameleon in Madagascar

How to properly use wild data for our chameleons in captivity

So, like with any information, we have to take it strategically and use it intelligently. Of course, there are different things you can do with the data you get from a trip to Madagascar or other chameleon wild destination. I’ll focus on what has the most effect on the chameleon community as a whole. And that is the creation of  care guides which will be the template that thousands of beginners will build their first chameleon husbandry from. Our job as herpetoculturists making care guides is a challenge because we need to create a care guide with one or two sets of conditions extracted from the myriad of experiences in the wild. Think about that. We have to settle on a basking temperature. A ambient day temperature. A night time drop temperature. A target day and nighttime humidity. But, in the wild, every minute of every day of every season is different. And the chameleon experiences these conditions differently depending on where in the forest they chose to be. So, in the creation of care guides we are extracting from this spectrum of experiences a set of idealized conditions that we are now going to immortalize in a care guide. And before you get the very good idea to have a care guide with 365 different days, remember that care guides are for the beginner. We have to simplify them to one set of conditions or else it is too much for them to implement. With my Chameleon Academy care guides I do have day and nighttime conditions, which is acceptable on the easy-to-understand scale, but I start pushing my luck by introducing wet and dry season conditions with some species. But this is reducing the entire chameleon life experience into two major conditions. So this is where we all can contribute to experimenting with finding the ideal combination of environmental conditions.

Case in point, fogging is slowly going from radical new ideal into mainstream implementation. This is because, simply, it works well for hydration. As is appropriate with any new idea, fogging has been challenged.  One of the challenges is that it doesn’t fog every night or even often in certain areas. While true, it is not a valid reason to discount the proven benefits of fogging. Let’s reiterate what a care guide is. A care guide is a selecting out of the most ideal conditions and we have all 365 days of a chameleon’s existence to choose from. So, we can choose between any of the many ways a chameleon hydrates. We have rain, dew, humidity, fogging, food, and even puddles on the ground. Chameleons will get hydration anyway they can. The question is, what is the ideal implementation. What do you want your chameleon to experience every day of the year? We need to understand the entire chameleon experience over the entire year so we can select out what is ideal. We need to use our intellect tot he best of our understanding to make this selection and, we need to acknowledge that then more we know the better we will be at making these decisions. For example, I am considering what parts of the dry season may be useful to include in our husbandry. Presently, I see no benefit in dehydration, but would a cooling down for 6 months out of the year increase health? To be determined. But going back to the wild source is the way that we can gain these insights and bring them back to try in captivity.

Conclusion

The way we bring natural data into our captive husbandry in a safe and effective way is to do so slowly with an ever expanding ring of participants. Our recent renaissance of a greater attention to humidity and hydration is a result of this mindset. An observation of the wild condition (the fog bank) was made and we experimented with it in captivity. You will be able to go back to this podcast in 2018 and hear the first episodes where Petr Necas and I started talking about it as a hydration method. After a number of years of me working with fogging the number of people experimenting with it expanded until I was able to have a show in 2023 with both James Cross who had effectively hydrated Parson’s Chameleons and Sean McNeeley who safely hydrated hatchlings. And now fogging as a hydration method is slowly becoming mainstream. This is an example of a natural observation being brought into our captive husbandry in the proper way – with caution and wide spread experimentation.

It all starts with natural observation that any of us with a curious mind can do. And I hope you are part of that

Join me for a weekly discussion about chameleons

Thank you for being part of this chameleon academy outreach. As always, every week has a topic which is presented in the weekly chameleon academy email newsletter. You can join the conversation by subscribing tot the newsletter yourself. The newsletter is a serious outreach for me. I know you are used to getting newsletters that are haphazardly thrown together to check a to-do box. But I put a great deal of effort into figuring out what is best for the community, where I want to take my herpetoculture, and writing substantial educational newsletters. So, try it out and see if it gives you the chameleon fix you are looking for!

And with that, I think it is time to send you back out into the world to be excellent to each other!

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