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I have a sub adult male veiled who gets misted 3 to 4 times a day. Temps are fine in its enclosure too (mesh flexarium). I noticed a little while ago that its hip bones had started to protrude and just didnt seem to be too keen on eating. I moved him from the family room to the reptile room in the basement thinking maybe us constantly being around him was stressing him out but no luck. Today I found him sitting on the bottom of his cage. Not a good sign at all.

Any advice on what I should do? Why is it not eating?

I would take him to a vets.

We can't diagnose him online without a lot more information or seeing him, and you may not want to wait for this. Seeing the hipbones in itself isn't a huge concern (the more accurate way to judge body weight is to look at the cross section of the tail at the base), but not eating or drinking and sitting on the cage bottom is. He's probably been fighting a problem for quite a while. Chams hide their problems until they are really in trouble. What brand of lighting? Most "full spectrum" lighting sold for herps is useless. ReptiSuns are great. When was it last replaced? You need to replace the UVB lighting about every 6 months. What are you feeding and how is it gutloaded? If you aren't gutloading your feeders well your cham will develop nutritional problems. What are you dusting with, how often? There are a lot of poor "cricket dusts" on the market and you can over and underdose them fairly easily. How does he get drinking water? If you provide water by misting do you know for sure he's drinking? What are the temps and the cage humidity levels? Just spraying and not knowing the cage humidity levels is asking for trouble. If you go to a vet without waiting to give us all this information, a good herp vet will ask you the same kinds of questions anyway.

I agree - good luck
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SandraChameleon@gmail.com
BC Canada

Ah I guess it was too late. I knew it was drinking because I saw him drinking regularly from the water off the leaves. He was shedding fine also.

Crickets were dusted with calcium and mineral supliment everytime and thrown into the cage. He didnt eat them all right away and usually there were crckets in the cage which had the calcium powder fallen off their body. Crickets were fed a cricket food diet with was supplimented with calcium.

A brand new UVB tube was used to light its enclosure with a flood light for basking and a ceramic lamp for night time temperature on one part of the cage.

Sorry to hear that you lost him.

I'm sorry to hear this. Not to make you feel worse than you do now (but hopefully helping with your next cham), I can see a couple of things that probably caused his trouble. You unintentionally overdosed calcium (yes, you can overdo it!) by dusting every day once the cham was older than a few months, and were probably missing some other nutrients by using the commercial gutload. Did you use a separate vitamin dust at all? Dusts that combine calcium and vitamins (other than D3) degrade while stored, so if you only used a calcium dust product the cham probably had some deficiencies. Very few commercial gutloads are complete. Unless your cage's room is below 50F at night, you should not be heating the cage at night. Chams require a temp drop of at least 10-15 degrees. Hopefully your next cham will benefit from the cham you lost.

I knew about overdosing chameleons on calcium but I thought it would beok todust them everytime as he only grabbed maybe 5 max while they were dusted and the rest he usually managed to grab when the dust had fallen off them. He also regularly ate the pothos plant in his enclosure and romain lettuce from time to time in addition to cricket that were always in his cage.

Because he was in a all screen enclosure the ceramic heatlamp only really heated up one end of his enclosure while the cooler end had a drop from the day time temp (the cool end at night is where the basking light would beon in the day). I wanted to provide the cham a choice of temps even at night and some times he spent it on a lower branch on the warm side and sometimes on the cool side depending on the ambient temp of the room.

Ah well, its disapointing losing an animal when you think you have all the bases covered but its great to get feedback from you all so next time I will try things a different way to be more successful.

Very sorry you lost him, sad, hope you feel better soon.
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PHEve / Eve

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