Reptile & Amphibian Forums

In all of the years I have been dealing with chams, never has MBD been such an issue as it is right now.

In the past 10 years, I probably have seen one case of MBD.
Within the last few months, I have seen MBD as the diagnoisis in at least 10 cases on this board!?

There is every tool avaialble for caring for chameleons. None of them are hard to get or are very expensive. Information on chams is everywhere. Webpage after webpage gives the basics.

So this is either 1 of 3 things.

1) Misdiagnosis - MBD is the catch all diagnosis when a chameleon is acting weird.
2) Weak bloodlines - The CB stock has been interbred or overbred causing very weak generations.
3) Really stupid caretakers - People just don't take the time to do this right. cutting corners, doing as little as possible to get by, etc.

If it is #1, then so be it. People read information and they feel impowered to use that information as a professional. No harm.

If it is #2, then we breeders have to start looking at our stock, and breeding for quality, not quantity.

If it is #3 (The saddest of all) then the chams will suffer. Theres nothing much you can do about it, except scold the morons for being morons.

You people have every tool available to do this right... All we had was a VitaLite a flood light and hose with holes drilled in it. And, we managed to raise many healthy generations of chameleon.

It MUST be because of pet stores buying off breeder surpllus, and selling them themselves, after a few months of eating crickets and crickets alone.

MY first male veilds was a LTC WC, and he had MBD when got him. He showed symptoms after a few months, after which he was treaded with calcium injections, and I bought Rep-cal.

Rep cal was fairly new, and it pretty much seemed to be the end of MBD. I raised dozens of baby veilds. I never used any UVB lighting. I fed my crickets fish food, and the ocational vegetable. I dusted them with rep-cal(this was even before rep-cal came in an "ultrafine powder" every day. I even fed rep-cal to the crickets. No sunlight, no UVB, no real gutloading, just REP-CAL with D3, and too much of it at that!

I NEVER had any of my animals develop MBD, Never.
I never had any animal develop calcium problems.

Until...I switched to minerall.
then, my big male veild, who was raised on miner-all, began to become weak. Hanging slightly from his branches. I went out and got some rep-cal, and within a week, he had become incredibly strong.
I think the miner-all I had bought was old, as it MUST have worked at first, otherwise him and my deremensis would have had MBD when they were young, not 17" long.

Bottom line: with MV bulbs, you can effectivly raise baby veilds WITHOUT Ca/D3 suppplementation. Even the reptisun bulbs are decent, whereas the vitalites we had were totally useless.
More than just Rep-cal is available. At the time, any other vitamins were useless, too much phosphorus, too much Vit A...
Even gutloads are available for us.

The WORST part, is that INFORMATION is available now. I had to go to the vet to find out about Rep-cal. I researched veilds left and right. I wasn't sure what to call them, I knew they were calyptratus, but I didn't know "veild". There were 2 boks of info by diVosjoli, and that was IT. Nobody I talked to, at the zoo, or on prodigy had a veild chameleon.
I still managed to find out.

I think people take information for granted nowadays. It was such an experience FINDING soumething aboiut SOMETHING back then. It was called research. Now, all you have to do is google, and you have access to anything you need to succede at veild chameleons.

SO much more is available to people now, it's amazing that anyone can mess it up!

It's the availability of the CHAMELEONS themselves. My first pair was $600. I might be a bit more inclined to care for them than if I paid $25.

Wish I knew how my baby got MBD. Used all I thought I had to. HAVE all the tools that are availible,i suppose it could be something in the breeding, but im not passing blame. He isnt bad, but he definately has it I dusted his crickets with miner-all once a week, i have a UVA/UVB bulb on him(within one foot of him) 12 hours a day. Wish I knew where things went wrong.

Remember, you CAN overdose the calcium and other mineral dusts. Ironically some overdosing can have the same symptoms as deficiency. MBD type symptoms can show up in chams who got way too much dust over a long time. It is not that simple. Ken Kalisch wrote a great article on veileds on the chameleon ezine a few months ago that talks about this. Part of our problem these days is there is TOO MUCH information presented by marginally educated keepers. It is hard to sift through it all, and people who get overwhelmed by how much care a cham might need will tend to keep searching until they hear what they want to...from someone who really doesn't know, has only kept a cham for a few months at best, or has never followed up on the health of babies they produced. Check out the veiled articles at www.chameleonnews.com. Also, there are good nutrition articles on www.herpnutrition.com. I trust the info there and they are worth the time.

What your saying is that information out there is vague or incorrect?
I agree that there are some caresheets out there that I don't agree with, but I don't agree that a majority of the problems are caused by people over-supplimenting,
I hear people everyday that don't have the foggiest idea how to properly care for chameleons but they have one sitting in a aquarium.
I hesitate to give people the benefit of the doubt when I constantly hear this crap.

My point was that MDB is so prevalent now than it has ever been. Even through the days where optimal tools and information weren't available, we had nowhere close the problems that we see here and now.

It has to lie in one of the 3 things I mentioned in the original post.

Well, the info is vague and confusing because the subject is, and there seems to be no clear single answer to this. Anyone who has worked with diurnal lizards in captivity probably has strong opinions based on their individual experience. I have kept chams only since 1994, supplemented them with various dusts (RepCal and Mineral), gutloads (from hardly anything to the ADCHAM super gutload) and frequencies (from every day to once a week) and have not seen severe MBD either. But, I used some common sense too. I know diurnal lizards need sun, so got mine outdoors as much as possible in addition to UV lighting. A big part of the problem is we keep our chams in different setups with different lighting and exposure to sun, feed them different gutloads etc. This all just complicates things. One thing to remember about the "old days" before specialized products...there were a lot fewer chams being kept, they were almost all wc adults who may have lived fairly short lives and not survived to produce young (where often deficiencies started to show up during rapid growth), there was very little communication between hobbyists, and likely deaths and health problems were not detected, diagnosed, or discussed as early as we tend to to now. There are a LOT more observations of health issues going on now, and the old saying about "the more you search the more you find" holds true. Still, there are a lot of healthy chams breeding into multiple generations these days so it hasn't been a complete failure.

I'm going to add a #4, if you don't mind...

4) Breeders/dealers/retail stores not taking the time and effort to educate these people on how to properly care for a cham. I've seen time after time, people come here looking for answers and saying that the person they got theirs from said this, that and the other thing...all wrong or totally incomplete information. Of course, the responsible, reputable breeders DO do this because they care about their animals...not just the money.

With the prices of the more readily available species going down, it seems that they are 1) not a significant investment for the new owner and 2) not worth the time for the seller to tell the buyer how to properly care for a cham.

Just my .02
Kristen
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0.2 pygmy leaf