What to Feed Hatchling Chameleons

Waiting for chameleon eggs to hatch is a lesson in patience, but once they hatch there is a flurry of activity to care for the hatchlings. This page reviews what you need to know about feeding hatchling or newly born chameleons. For the purposes of this write-up, live birth chameleons are treated exactly the same. I will make it simple and refer to them as baby chameleons from now on. I will cover feeding topics from hatching or birth to about three months old. This information is appropriate for first time breeders with their first clutch of eggs, the first time owner that purchased an egg, and the owner of a live bearing species who just walked down the stairs and was surprised by 30 baby chameleons crawling around the cage. Whether you have months to plan or are surprised by babies or have one or 60, this page will get you taken care of with respect to feeding your chameleons.

The first thing to know about feeding baby chameleons is that their mission in life is to eat as much as they can to grow as fast as they can to mature and reproduce. So your little baby will be a eating machine. And we need to have ample food available to feed this need. Do not be surprised if they do not eat within 24 hours of hatching or being born, but it won’t be long at all after that that they will be searching for things that fit in their mouths.

Before I get into the actual feeding I need to address the effect of caging on feeding. Chameleons should be raised separately. It is by having a room all to their own that they will eat and grow to their full potential. One component of when chameleons bully each other is that the bully will intimidate the victim into not eating as much. And this is a bullying that does not register in human minds. You look at the group and you don’t see physical fight breaking out and you think all is well. But it is not well and your chameleons are growing at a decreased rate because they are not eating their fill. And, they are dealing with the stress of living with a bully. And, yes, it is normal for there to be a hierarchy. Chameleons establish dominance and the submissive one suffers. So, in this episode about feeding I need to start by saying that the best preparation you can do is to prepare one cage for each egg you have. If you have a live bearer, well good luck. You just have to make an educated guess as to how many babies you might have and set-up a number of cages over that! But it isn’t that babies will immediately beat up on each other so being together for the first weeks while you get everything setup is not going to be a big deal.

Chameleons will eat anything that moves and will fit in their mouth. There are many great feeders out there, but I am going to limit my coverage to the commercially available species that are the easiest to get a hold of. Each country will have differing choices so I will not be able to make that a worldwide claim. But hopefully there is enough overlap that this will be useful no matter where you are. I will cover fruit flies, bean beetles, and pin head crickets. These are easy to reproduce and are readily available. That said, each has their advantages and disadvantages.

There are two scenarios when babies show up. They were either part of an incubating clutch and expected, or else they may have been a complete surprise and live birthed by a female which may or may not have been known to be gravid. But if you do have time to prepare then you make an educated guess as to when the eggs will hatch. And then make sure you have everything setup a month before the due date. This means starting fruit fly and bean beetle cultures one month before they are expected to be needed. You may go through two or more generations of fruit flies by time the chameleon egg hatches because you will be lucky if the eggs hatch when you estimate. The best case is you are right. The second best case is that it takes longer and you have more time to fix things that go unexpectedly wrong, and the worst case scenario – I mean besides the eggs going bad – is that they come earlier when you aren’t ready. But the inconvenience of having a fruit fly farm as a side project is much better than having a baby chameleon hatch and no food to give them. I, personally, enjoy keeping a dart frog and so I am always making fruit fly cultures. This is actually much more necessary for me as I have a good number of live bearing chameleons and they sometimes like to surprise me. Small litters aren’t always obvious. So having a dart frog (or ten) is a worthwhile project. I submit that to you as my weekly commitment to finding new ways to get you in trouble with the spouse. You already are on shaky ground for starting a fruit fly farm. May as well run with it.

In recap, if you are incubating eggs, or an egg, or are seeing your live bearing female balloon up, it is a wise move to be prepared with individual cages already set up and fruit fly and bean beetle cultures in rotation.

But what do you do if you are surprised? This can happen easily if the eggs hatch sooner than expected or you didn’t realize that your single female Jackson’s Chameleon was just storing sperm for a self-fertilization when the conditions were right. Or else you just learned that certain female Jackson’s Chameleons actually have three horns like the males. I can’t tell you how much confusion there is for people that don’t realize that there are a number of subspecies of Jackson’s Chameleons and in only one does the female not have horns. So, you can imagine the surprise when someone who thought they had a male suddenly finds babies all over.

If you are surprised then getting food and are the top panic points. This episode is about the food part.

Unfortunately, both fruit fly and bean beetle cultures can take weeks to get going. This is not problem when you are starting the cultures a month before the due date. But when you suddenly have babies crawling all around, you do not have weeks for the fruit fly life cycle to take the scenic route. Luckily, pin head crickets, which are newly hatched crickets, are readily available and immediately useable as feeders.

So then a good plan, if you are surprised, is to immediately order yourself a shipment of pin head crickets. How many depends on how many babies. I order 40 pinheads per day per chameleon. So, if I have one baby Panther Chameleon I would order 280 pinhead crickets per week. I generously round up and go for the 500 count cup because you always want to err on the side of more. Crickets die and escape. Also order your fruit flies and bean beetle cultures now and get them started.

There is another hope for getting small food quickly. Set out a piece of fruit. If you have fruit flies wild in your area at this particular time of year you are in luck because you have all the free food you want. I create small deli cups filled with banana and let the fruit flies swarm. Be careful you don’t create a decaying fruit bog which a chameleon could get stuck in, but you’ll be fine if you change out the cups on a regular basis and you can always include a screen over the fruit. Just keep an eye on it.

If you have been surprised by baby chameleons take a look at this page written specifically for the surprise situation: Surprise! Baby Chameleons!

Fruit flies are the perfect food for baby chameleons. We are lucky to benefit from the scientific community in that we can easily get a hold of flightless fruit flies. So they are much more easily contained and controlled! Flightless fruit flies are commonly available in two sizes. Just remember the smaller one comes with the bigger name! So we have Drosophila melanogaster which is the smaller one and Drosophila hydei which is the larger one. Which one you choose depends on the size of your babies. You can’t go wrong with going smaller so the melanogaster is the safest bet. Though, Panther, Veiled and Jackson’s babies usually can take the larger hydei from the beginning. Personally, I keep both sizes on hand.

When ordering fruit flies you can order them by name or, if you can’t remember what the name is, you can always ask for the smaller or larger variety and they will know what you are talking about. The one thing about ordering fruit fly cultures is that, if you need them now, you have to ask if they are “producing” which means that there are already flies in the cup. When the company creates the fruit fly cups it starts with a seed population of 20 or so flies. They lay eggs which hatch, turn into larvae which pupae and then emerge as 100s of flies. This whole process can take 14 days for melanogaster, the small one, to 21 days for hydei, the larger one. Once flies emerge you can keep getting flies for a week or two. If you are buying these cups and you have a sense of urgency, it is a good idea to ask at what stage the cups are. Usually we ask, are they “producing”, meaning are they actively producing adult flies that can be fed immediately. If you are preparing a month before then it doesn’t really matter, but if you have hungry mouths to feed right now, it may be an important thing to know.

Fruit flies are easy to culture yourself and many reptile supply companies will sell you mixes and kits that make it even easier. To create fruit fly cultures you need plastic cups with a ventilated top, nutritious medium, excelsior (which is like wood shavings for them to climb on), and your small group of adult flies.

I use 32 oz deli cups with ventilated lids that have a cloth ventilation so the fruit flies can’t get out and wild fruit flies can’t get in. If there is any chance, your wild fruit flies will get in and have a party. While wild fruit flies are great feeders, they refuse to stay contained as they are fully flighted. I can tell you from experience that clouds of fruit flies within the house tend to make other people in the house cranky.

You can make your own culture media which goes on the bottom of your cup like tan mashed potatoes, but I prefer to get premade mix that I can just add water to and go on with my life. It is this media that has all the nutrients and the fruit flies will eat. There are many companies that offer these mixes. Currently, I use the fruit fly media from Repashy and I have been happy with that.

One important thing to remember when you are working with the media is usually you are using boiling water to mix it. Let this cool before you put the flies in the cup or else you will kill the poor flies.

On top of the media you often see excelsior which is long thin strips of curling wood. It is used for packing and art projects, but we use it in our fruit fly cups to give the fruit flies some place to perch and hang out. And that is it. Keep your cultures in the mid 70s for temperature and around 65% humidity and you should be good.

Bean beetles are a curious creature that lives entirely on beans. The scientific name is Callosobruchus maculatus

But that is such an unwieldy thing to try and remember, that everyone just calls them bean beetles. Chameleons love the crunchy snack. They may be a bit big for the smallest of babies, but those on the small side will quickly grow to the size of taking in the bean beetles. They do fly when agitated, but they are not strong fliers so you don’t get clouds of them. They just fly from one point to another.

Culturing them is as easy as putting a number of them in a cup of beans. You can use black eyed peas, mung beans, or adzuki beans. With those beans in a 32 ounce deli cup with ventilated lid, you add the beetles and then something like a toilet paper tube stuffed in to the bean pile to provide a climbing surface and an easy way to get the beetles out. It will take 4 or so weeks for the seed group of adults to have laid eggs and that new generation to come out. Simply keep them in temperatures in the low 80s and you should have lots of bean beetles. I make new cultures every weekend to keep things fresh as the culture cup will crash after a couple of lifecycles.

As I mentioned, bean beetles fly when agitated so you want to move quickly when messing with them. Even if you are using fruit flies as your staple food item, bean beetles are a great choice to provide dietary variety.

And, finally, we have pin head crickets. The name “pin head” isn’t a species. It refers to their size. Breeding crickets is not terribly complex, but it does require a pretty high level of work. I have tried a number of times, have been successful in producing loads of hatchling crickets, but have found maintaining an entire breeding colony of crickets to be more work than I am willing to put into it. But, if you have the gumption to do so, then it really is not a problem to breed your own crickets.

Whether you buy or breed them, you need to place a high priority on making sure they are fed properly. I keep mine in a Sterilite container with egg crates to climb on and a food dish that has a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and one of the various cricket chows available.

I get my baby chameleons transitioned to crickets within a month because crickets do a very good job of putting on the weight.

Now, you may be wondering how to get started with culturing your own fruit flies or bean beetles. We are fortunate that the reptile community has grown to the point where we have ample availability of supplies. If you are just starting out, the easiest way to do this is to just buy a kit. I know Joshsfrogs.com has complete kits for fruit flies and bean beetles. Once you get some experience under your belt or are doing this long term, that is the time to start buying parts individually. I buy the Repashy Superfly fruit fly mix from any Repashy retailer. My cups and lids come from TSK.com and Excelsior I get at art stores. But go that route only if you plan on producing fruit flies at a large scale.

Babies come out of the egg or from the mother with a built-in store of nutrients to get them started in life. How well off they are depends on the nutrition the mother had. While you can continue to have effect on the baby’s nutrition in live bearers through the incubation period, an egg layer has to get the transfer of nutrients all done in the gestation period which is commonly 30 days 7 to 12 or 24 months ago. So the question comes – at what point do we start in with our supplementation powders? And there isn’t a clear answer on this. I know of breeders that start in with powders that have vitamin A and D3, two fat soluble vitamins, right away and some that refuse to use powders until months old. As I see success with multiple approaches I don’t have a firm guideline that I can say if you stray from here there will be death and destruction. So I will present my personal approach and you can decide what you would like to do.

Since my babies all have access to UVB I am not worried about them getting enough Vitamin D3.

I start to provide a 50/50 mix of calcium and bee pollen as a light dusting around the two week mark. I will continue to provide them with calcium/bee pollen and feeder insects with a rich gutload. Some astute students may then ask why all my care summaries have a multivitamin powder recommended if I do not use them myself. The answer is that I cannot tell you why I can give only calcium and bee pollen and not have cases of vitamin A deficiency and others do. I haven’t figured out what about my gutloading or situation leads to that success. Thus I have to have a multivitamin in the care summaries as a safety net so that it is effective to as many people as possible. Even if people are getting sufficient vitamin A precursors from their gutloading, the small amount of vitamin A in the multivitamin won’t cause a problem so it is a good insurance policy to use the multivitamin. If I were to use a multivitamin I would start in at about two months. But there is no study or data to prove that is a better time than any other time.

So, that is what I do. I present it only as something that has worked for me and it takes its place alongside numerous other approaches that appear to work as well. I know it is sometimes frustrating when there isn’t a black and white answer, but this is where we are. As soon as I have a black and white answer to give, you’ll be the first to know.

Everything is connected in nature. So too here. Any discussion about feeding baby chameleons must include a look at UVB, heat, and hydration. All three of these, in appropriate levels, are necessary for the adequate processing or supplementation of the food eaten.

The proper UVB allows the chameleon to create vitamin D3 through its skin.

The proper heat levels are necessary for digestion. Consult the care summary to determine what the basking temperature must be.

And hydration is critical for chameleons to digest food and eliminate waste.

Be very careful, though of how much UVB, heat, and hydration you put into the system as babies can easily be overwhelmed. If you use smaller cages, everything is in miniature and you need to adjust for the delicate bodies of the baby chameleons.

Each species may have a slightly different need on these parameters so find a caresheet written by someone who has actually worked with the species you have. Or, better yet, be nice to a breeder and ask questions! What ever you do, make sure the babies are getting the proper levels for that species.

I am sure it comes as a surprise to no one that keeping a chameleon is really taking care of the environment around the chameleon and letting the chameleon take care of themselves.

Everything is connected in nature. So too here. Any discussion about feeding baby chameleons must include a look at UVB, heat, and hydration. All three of these, in appropriate levels, are necessary for the adequate processing or supplementation of the food eaten.

The proper UVB allows the chameleon to create vitamin D3 through its skin.

The proper heat levels are necessary for digestion. Consult the care summary to determine what the basking temperature must be.

And hydration is critical for chameleons to digest food and eliminate waste.

Be very careful, though of how much UVB, heat, and hydration you put into the system as babies can easily be overwhelmed. If you use smaller cages, everything is in miniature and you need to adjust for the delicate bodies of the baby chameleons.

Each species may have a slightly different need on these parameters so find a caresheet written by someone who has actually worked with the species you have. Or, better yet, be nice to a breeder and ask questions! What ever you do, make sure the babies are getting the proper levels for that species.

I am sure it comes as a surprise to no one that keeping a chameleon is really taking care of the environment around the chameleon and letting the chameleon take care of themselves.