Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have been asking all the "reptile" people questions and all the petstores that I frequent questions about chameleons, and went to the reptile show this weekend and picked up a second chameleon.( I can feel the addiction coming on )

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone here for being so helpful and helping me set up the first one. She is doing great and is shedding right now. I just finished misting her area, and she is now hiding under a leaf.

Every petstore and even the people at the reptile show- I am very dissapointed. I recieved wrong advice-I heard they can all live together until they are sexually mature, then you only seperate out the extra males. I heard aquariums work great. Nothing was mentioned about UVB,UVA, etc. Expect one dealer told me to use a heat lamp. Nobody mentioned misting at all.Thank goodness for the internet.

I have really enjoyed comparing the two that I now have. THe first one is more calm, finds her favorite spot and just hangs out-doesnt move much, and hates being misted, wont eat from my hand at all. If she even sees me putting food out, she runs and hides. Very hard to see her drink.The new one is EVERYWHERE-very very active, eats from a delicup that I hold, and when I mist him he holds his head up and appears to enjoy it-at least he doesnt run away so I think he enjoys it.Drinks from the leaves, the dripper, during being misted. ALready aggressive though-when I first brought him home and put him onto his plants,(in a different room than my original), he thrashed around, changed color and BIT me...heh heh, little tiny bite, could barely get ahold of my finger with that little mouth.

On another note- these silkworms that I have are now HUGE, bigger than the chams. How long do they take until they form a cacoon?

I'm raising my first panthers (brother and sister ambanja's -2 months old) for the first time, and I sympathize with getting bad advice from breeders. I bought mine at the end of April at the NC Reptile Show at 2 weeks old and was given so much mis-information it was pathetic. Like you said, luckily there's the internet, but what about people who take these guys at their word and don't do their own research? Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I bought some tiny silkworms right after I got my panthers, and now the same worms are the size of a pinkie or a ring finger. The first one started spinning a cocoon today, and they are probably 1.5 months old. I know they are typically supposed to live 1 month before they spin though. Hope this helps.

P.s. -for baby panthers, the silkworms only stay small enough for them to eat for a few days.

I guess the take home lesson here is to remember the prime motivation for pet shops and (unfortunately) many breeders...they are trying to sell you something. Not all breeders do it for sheer interest in chams. I don't like to generalize, but often breeders who are working with rarer species or who have private collections of fussy obscure species are less likely to be in it for a buck...and tend to give more thorough information. Revealing how complicated cham care can be is NOT something most commercial dealers want to do. They don't want to scare away customers who demand an easy pet. The motivation for forums and some better breeders is concern over the species in our care...and if some money comes out of it great.