Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Do you think that with an free range setup where you have a quarter of your big room square off with plants and vines all over that it is ok to house a male and female. I have a feeling the answer is probably no and I dont think I would buy another at this point anyway, but its just food for thought.Thanks

I know that the general rule with chameleons is not to house them together, I'm not sure whether or not they'd be fine housed together in a space as large as you're talking, especialy if provided with plenty of cover, although just to be on the safe side to reduce stress on the animals when they do encounter eachother, I wouldn't advise on it.

Which species are we talking about? Sorry, I can't remember what everyone has. What size area are you talking about? I think you could do this PROVIDING you can do the following:

Have a cage setup ready for either the male or the female if she becomes gravid, shows signs of stress, or seems to be harrassed by the male.

Provide several basking, hiding, drinking and feeding spots in separate areas with good foliage barriers between them. The chams won't bask, drink, or eat normally if they are intimidated by the other. The intimidated one will spend most of its time down lower in the plants showing darker stressed coloration.

Provide a lot of travel pathways so they can get away from each other easily and so they don't have to use the same routes to get to food, light or water.

Provide the proper humidity and exposure to UV light. You'll probably have to spray the entire setup more as drippers may not work as well for drinking.

i have done a free range setup with one male and three females in my bed room. what i did was buy a large ficus tree for each chameleon and by large i mean atleast 5ft tall. i put them all in tall pots so they could not get down to the ground and had a heat lamp for each tree. i only kept them seperated around the room like this for a short while. i was sucessfull in breeding them (jacksons chameleons) in this way also. what i did was to use a plastic baby pool and put all the potted trees inside of it. i suspended three different heat lamps from the ceiling to provide multiple basking spots and i set up a misting system which was also suspended from the celing. the baby pool helps both to keep the chams in (especially when the female had babies) and also to keep water from getting everywhere. this method worked wonderful for me but you still must keep and eye on everyone. if you have a not so agressive male and bushy trees with plenty of hiding places you should be fine. make sure to keep an eye on the females colors as you may need to seperate the trees if she is too stressed. lastly reguarding feeding, most of my feeding was done by tweezers so that i could record how much each was consuming, but i would also hang plastic cups with twist ties from branches and they would easily be able to eat from them without haveing to worry about the prey getting out. with this method you only have to watch that the cups do not fill up with water from misting. any more questions i would be glad to answer as i said i have sucessfully done this not only as regular housing but in a breeding colony as well.
jay