As many of you know Tanzania hasn’t issued any export permits for 2006. Many different species that are available in the chameleon trade come from this country, more specifically several different species of leaf chameleons. In fact, the vast majority of the leaf chameleons you see for sale come from Tanzania.
There is an awfully good chance that export licenses will not be issued this year and possibly never again or for some time.
Being predominately a leaf chameleon keeper, this disturbs me quite a bit and on a few different levels. One being that I won’t be able to replenish my breeding groups with fresh blood and/or replace deceased chameleons. The other is the fact that as a community we currently don’t have a solid captive bred population like we see with veileds and panthers and yet keepers are purchasing leaf chameleons left and right.
I am not implying that keepers/breeders should start setting up large breeding groups of leaf chameleons in order to build up a captive population to equal what we see with veileds and panthers. That would obviously be costly and there is really no real profit in leaf chameleons from what I can see (which is probably the main reason why we don’t see a lot of CB pygmies). All boils down to money folks.
What I am asking is that keepers who have kept them in the past and keepers who have a good working knowledge of chameleons (experienced) that are somewhat interested in these species take up a small group of them. If we get enough SERIOUS keepers working with small groups then we just may be able to keep one another going with these species.
Of course we won’t be able to satiate the small demand for them, but I’m not interested in providing pygmies for the impulse buyers, newbies, etc. – I’m more interested in serious keepers like myself who love all things pygmy and want to keep their hobby going.
The two species that I suggest:
R. brevicaudatus
R. temporalis
If you are mulling this over, don’t forget one of the cooler aspects of keeping pygmy chameleons … their enclosures. Others may disagree, but IMO you certainly can get much more creative with a pygmy enclosure then you can with a true chameleon one.
It’s also important that they are wild caught specimens and not captive bred. There are only a couple breeders offering CB pygmies – one being myself, and I wouldn’t want to acquire any F2 offspring from my groups for obvious reasons.
The other side of the coin is the true chameleons. I don’t currently work with any true chameleons indigenous to Tanzania, but it would be a shame to burn that bridge for any future interests. So this is obviously an issue for many keepers.
Even if Tanzania decides to issue permits, some day the importation of chameleons will stop and I suspect that day may be sooner then later.
So this is my call to arms for the sake of the hobby.
-roo
