Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is a continuation of the thread from this message...
http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=1247413,1247413

HA! we must have been posting at the exact time. Below is vet update (I moved it up for same reason).

That did cross my mind when the edema developed. I asked my vet about Vitamin A levels in blood and he said he knows of no one (I think he meant locally) able to do it.
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Chameleon Help & Resource Info
1.0 Nosy Be Panther Chameleon - Cyrus
0.1 Veiled Chameleon - Luna. She's now hanging from her big jungle gym in the sky
1.0 Beardie - Darwin
1.1.1 Side-blotched lizards - Ana and Stan
0.2 felines - Kyndra and Lita
0.1 African Clawed Frog - Skippy
0.1 Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula - Rosa Leigh, Died 4/21/06
0.1 Goliath Bird-Eater Tarantula - Natasha, donated to science 4/4/06
?.? Pinktoe Tarantula - no name yet

The vitamin A would probably not show up in large amounts anyway
since you stopped giving it. I would imagine if vit A was the culprit, the initial spike in concentration would have been what caused damage to the liver or kidneys, edema showing up as a symptom.

Just to recap: I think he would be deficient in Vit A since Herptivite has beta carotene, not preformed and since I was not feeding him pinkie mice or other animals he would be getting minimal. The 2 doses of palmitate 8000iu (.1ml) was all he got in the way of preformed that was in Dec.

The one thing I am hopeful about is that the edema is not severe. I recenlty saw a pic (on another forum) of a female with edema and she looked like she was going to burst! Poor thing His is not even as bad as Luna used to get with her crazy hormone cycle (you may recall - eggs every 3 months) and his does actually seem
to be diminishing. I am a bit concerned about the salt retention issue, which would likely be coming from the water.

But he seemed to be almost back to his ol' self today. He was great at the vet and when we got home, after basking, he ate 3 superworms! That is a marked improvement, so maybe he does/did have a little infection and the anti-bio helped. We'll see how he is tomorrow.

I have decided to stop supplements altogether - for now at least, even calcium (well, we'll see what is Ca/blood is on Monday) and just depend on gutload. The longer I have chameleons I hear from the keepers who have them for a long time that they rarely, if ever, use supplements and depend only on gutload, so I am going to do the same. My side-blotched lizards rarely get dusted feeders, b/c I never know when they are going to eat. Ana will sometimes lick at the sand so I sprinkle in some Ca/D3, then the next time just straight CA and she comes right over and licks what she needs. Stan never does it. She knows what her system needs. I have had them for nearly a year and they are doing great. Darwin loves calcium so I will sometimes sprinkle it on his greens to get him to eat them (it works), a but again, he is such a sporadic eater, even in the summer months, that he almost never gets multi-vit. He too is doing just fine.

Let's hope Cy's liver and kidney numbers are OK - fingers crossed!

lele
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Chameleon Help & Resource Info
1.0 Nosy Be Panther Chameleon - Cyrus
0.1 Veiled Chameleon - Luna. She's now hanging from her big jungle gym in the sky
1.0 Beardie - Darwin
1.1.1 Side-blotched lizards - Ana and Stan
0.2 felines - Kyndra and Lita
0.1 African Clawed Frog - Skippy
0.1 Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula - Rosa Leigh, Died 4/21/06
0.1 Goliath Bird-Eater Tarantula - Natasha, donated to science 4/4/06
?.? Pinktoe Tarantula - no name yet

My herp vet used to be a field researcher,
and once did an experiment raising a group of baby fence lizards using d3multivitans, calcium only, and no suppliments. The group that got the d3multivitamin daily had a high mortalitydisease ratio, the calcium only was better, and the no suppliment (just a weak gutload like apples, carrots, and potatoes) group were all healthy! Goes to show how potent these vitamins can really be if not used properly!

I am not against dusting at all, but I think more and more that dusting developed because there were no good feeder gutloads on the market, people are lazy and didn't do their nutrition research before getting a cham, they didn't want to go to all the trouble of offering a wide variety of feeders hoping to fill in the nutritional gaps, and most people (including commercial supplement makers) have this general idea that vitamins just can't do anything but good (a little is good so more is better). Also, many herp products get designed by breeders...and they are supplementing animals who are burning their own reserves to produce. Over the years of keeping chams and other herps I've found I have relaxed my supplementation a lot...and the animals just don't show signs of deficiency. But, I take care of my feeders, keep the setups clean, designed carefully for the needs of my animals, get the best lighting I can find, and look at supplements as occasional "gap fillers" not daily requirements. I don't have any breeding females, so I don't coat everything with calcium. I have lost chams to various things (URI, tissue necrosis, intestinal blockage, ruptured egg folicle, age), but none to things like MBD, vitamin overdose, etc.

As soon as I moved this up I saw your post about your trip to the vets! LOL! We WERE posting at the same time!

I might be going out on a limb here, but does anyone worry about these concerns and vet trips harming the animal more than the initial issue? I'm a firm believer that vets often do more damage than good (more often than not), and if I was to take a perfectly healthy chameleon in and have these tests done, give these nutrition schedules out of 1983 book written in Canada and diagnose the crap that comes out the other end (so to speak), I'd be more worried after the fact than ever.

I have never dedicated less time to each adult male chameleon than I am currently, and they have never done better. Relaxing supplements, never handling, feeding them less and less, and relaxing the "singing to it in the morning" type of stuff really helps them thrive. If I was to notice a problem, I would attempt to fix the problem without ever taking the chameleon out of the cage, through nutrition, hydration temps, lighting, whatever, depending on the problem. If your gutloading and setup is even close, they can fix themselves. Truth is, having these things even close will prevent 90% of problems.

Just reading through this thread, I can't help but remember the old "micromanaging" thread we touched on 2 years ago or so. I'm not at all trying to be rude, I just can't believe a chameleon can live through this kind of attention. The initial problem was exactly that, the initial problem.
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Tyler Stewart
Las Vegas NV
www.BLUEBEASTREPTILE.com