Ok, I have 2 adult females, and one adult male. the male doesn't seem too interested in mating. The little male, is(remember the pic). Well, I screwed up last week---REALLY screwed up, I mean, probably about as much as I could have screwed up. I left the door to my big veild's cage un-latched--as I have done in the past.
I cam home after my 2nd job, after the lights had been out several hours...to see something surreal.
Eerily calm, yet subtley terrifying.
In the large walless enclosure, nestled in the branched among the 4 deremensis, was my near-twenty-inch-long calyptratus.
Took me a while to take the scene in.
Everyone looked pretty calm--they were all at their usual sleeping positions. Even the male deremensis was fine, sleeping just a foot away from the veild.
A horrible thought then occurred to me--while the deremensis completly ignore the veild when I show it to them, the veild tried to mate with them. I guess female deremensis look enough like female calyptratus, with the higher than normal casque, etc.
Upon close examination, the male was unhurt. The little male was unhurt. The two females bore the obvious scars of a recent mating attempt--their privious lack of any scars was a testament to eith my male's lack of aggression or motivation--no such problems with the veilds though...
SO, I now have two female deremensis that were(and might still be) receptive and (probably) un-mated (to a deremensis).
God, I hope HOPE, that the veild was not sucessful. And if he was, I hope that his sperm doesn't do ANYTHING to the deremensis.
The only thing worse that having Un-mated female deremensis is having them filled with un-hatchable eggs...
IF however, a mating DID take place, and SOMEHOW, the eggs are viable, I will incubate them. I cannot imagine they would actually making it to full term, but you never know. BEsides, I can HOPE that at least ONE of the male deremensis did manage to do the deed first. I was not there monitoring them more than a half hour a day, so you never know.
I do however think that at least one of my females did mate with the veild. I know she was ready to mate--she readily lifted her tail to the tiny male the privious week. I know the veild was too. It wouldn't surprise me.
Could you think of a more abhorrent hybrid? I can see it now.
I've been trying to get freakin deremensis to breed for 3 years, I've had one pair mate, but no eggs. I lost THAT male in May. Now, my WC male acts like a eunic, I have an over-eager sub-adult, two females ready and waiting, and I'll end up with rainbow colored, high-casqued, fin-backed, 3-horned, giant desert/tropical rainforest chameleons that'll need temperatures somewhere between 70 and 100 degrees during the day....
to top it off, they'll probably be mean as h*ll too.
funny, this happened just a few days after I decided I needed to transfer the veild to a separate, totally secure cage---just in case.
Eric A
