Reptile & Amphibian Forums

As you might have seen there is a cascade of posts from me complaining that my veiled has stopped eating.The last few days I eliminated every stress factor I could think but seen no result.I wanted to ask about my cage size,he is 14in including the tail and the cage is about 50 gallons vertical.How is this?I am allready preparing him a much larger one

I have seen the cascade of posts and answered some of them too. Others have given you good answers too.

You say its a 50 gallan vertical...glass tank or what?
Is it possible that he sees a reflection of himself somewhere?

One thing that might be stressing him that you haven't removed is yourself....are you around him a lot?

Now...let's try this again to see if we can figure out what your chameleon's problem is concerning not eating...(I'm not going back to re-read all your posts, so if I repeat my self or ask questions that you have already answered, I'm sorry...but I read and answer lots of posts on several forums and its hard to keep everything in my mind.)

He might not have been eating because you were trying to hand feed him and it was stressful to him. Have you changed the way you feed him now. (He will eat less than normal because of the seasonal changes.) Is he eating anything at all?

You asked questions about the watering/misting/dehydration...for my veiled chameleons, I have a dripper that consists of a container with a small hole in the bottom that allows the water to drip at about the rate of 2 drips per second. I also mist the cages once or twice a day. My chameleons are used to the schedule and come to the dripper and the mist to drink....almost like they are trained. You said in one post that he didn't look dehydrated...what are you basing this on? What are you looking at when you say he's not dehydrated? (IMHO, he would still eat if mildly dehydrated.)

Have you tried a variety of foods...both insect and greens/fruits/veggies?

Are the temperatures in your cage right? Basking about 90F and remainder of the cage in the 80's?

Are the lights out at night and the cage allowed to drop in temperature into the low 70's?

How often do you look in on him? Handle him? How often are you in sight? You may be stressing him out by being around him.

How is his behavior? Does he keep his eyes open all day? Does he move around the cage? Does he behave in a stressed/agressive (runs away from you/hisses, gapes, body vertically inflated, etc.)manner when you are around him?

IMHO if he is not dehydrated, stressed, bored with the food and if his temperatures are correct as well as all other husbandry issues...then he is sick and should see a vet.

I hope you can solve his problem before its too late. They can go quite a while without food, but eventually they have to eat or they will die.

I appriciate the fact that you are constantly trying to help recalling old posts too,I just want to say that my cham is perfectly healthy.His eyes,movements,reactions,colours,toung flicking,every thing is healthy.I thing I can tell a healthy lizard when I see one,just take my word for it.
Something happened moments before and made me very sceptical,I just came from work and saw the field(black) crickets I released this morning in his enclosure still there,so I tried to hand feed him several of them one by one(Don't worry I am not overstressing him,just now)with out a responce,he just stressed a lot and then I remembered that the days he started going on diet was perhaps the ones I started feeding him field ckrickets.From the day I bought him I was feeding him brown crickets only(gryllus asymillis).So I run and brought him a brown one from the old batch I keep separetely.Once he saw the rapid movements of the brown cricket on my hand he immediatly focused came closer to my hand and gave that cricket a really healthy toung slap,chew and ate it.I don't want to believe I found what the problem was cause I don't want to be disappointed again.We will see...

Sorry if I seemed a bit harsh in my last reply...but we didn't seem to be getting anywhere in solving the problem...so I was trying to cover all possibilities again. I never thought about you feeding him field crickets (most people feed insects that they get from a store)....but I think you have hit the nail on the head! (If only you had mentioned that you had changed his food....and especially that you had changed it to BLACK field crickets.) Generally chameleons (and quite a few other lizards for that matter) won't eat BLACK bugs. I'm wondering if there is something toxic or distasteful in black bugs.

I think you are going to find that the problem is solved. Let me know after he has had a few more of the brown crickets.

BTW...if you can get them, its good to feed your chameleon a wide variety of insects...silkworms (one of the best foods for them), wax worms (fatty, but a good treat), super worms (and no, they don't eat their way out of the stomach of a chameleon...at least not in my experience and I've been keeping chameleons for over 16 years now), tomato horn worms (NOT ones collected from the wild because they eat tomato plants, etc. which are full of toxins that will kill your chameleon), etc. You can feed them insects that are WC but you should be careful that the insects you chose are not toxic and even then, you risk your chameleon picking up a parasite that it can't handle. (If your chameleon were WC and had a parasite from its native land, it could handle it in most cases...but sometimes parasites that are not normal to them can cause a lot of problems.)

Your chameleon might enjoy a bit of fruit or greens or leaves from non-toxic plants or veggies added to his diet. (I can't remember what or if we already discussed this.)

Looking forward to hearing if the problem is solved.

Black field crickets also have a much harder chitin shell than our commercially bred ones. I doubt they are as easy to eat and digest. They may cause intestinal problems too if that's the basic diet. A few for variety won't really hurt, but as a staple, probably not a good idea.

How often are you feeding him and how long did he go without eating?
(I'm at work, the internet connection is SLOW, and I do not have a
chance to go back and read old posts, sorry)

when my veileds would go on hunger strikes for a few days, it was
always the same problem, one I would not repeat. I over fed them.

I gave them too much food in a short period of time, and after a week
or two of this, they'd stop eating for several days, usually only
regaining interest when I gave them something new, like a superworm
pupae, cicada or grasshopper.

I was young, and didn't know any better. I thought that they'd stop
eating when they were ready...
so, I fed them all they could eat.

My WC male veiled, only 12 inches total length, would eat over 20
adult crickets a day, for several days in a row. It's no wonder he
would slow down! My big male, twice his size, eats nowhere near as
many at once.

Try silkworms, and silkmoths, superworm pupae and beetles*,
mealworm beetles and pupae, and waxmoths. Vary it up as much as
possible, using the less stable adult forms of classic feeder insects for
added variety. Most of the time, the adults will be less nutritious than
their fat larvae, but it'll add variety. Also, the adult beetles are very
crunchy, even more so than the larvae. Some crunchieness is good,
but not too much. I try to balance it out.

Superworm beetles are nice an dbig and crunchy, most chameleons go
nuts for big crunchy beetles. The onyly problem is that they secrete a
natural chemical defense from their rear end - I bever had a veiled that
would eat them. They'd spit them out as fast as they brought them in.
My melleri was gettign fussy, and wouldnt' eat superworms last year. I
took a beetle, rinsed it's rear end off well, and he loved it. He eats
them all the time now, as a treat. By far his favorite food item, more
so than even large roaches. I have yet to try washing them and feeding
them to veileds. I'm tryign to start a superworm colony, so I dont'
want to waste the adults right now...

Thanks a lot everyone for the help,I think I can solve this problem by triggering him with new prey.Unfortunaly the only items I have available over here are crickets,mealworms,superworms and grasshoppers which are too big for him.I have not experimented with anything else than crickets on chameleons yet but I will start soon. When I mentioned field crickets earlier I ment the variety,not the wild caught crickets.I buy those too from the pet store,thanks anyway on those helpful hints on wild cought bugs though.Also I can say there is no case that I have overfed him.So tomorrow I am going back to the shop getting some more brown crickets and I will let you know soon..
Thanks

Where is "over here"?

Be careful if you use grasshoppers too...some of them have caused problems in chameleons....and NEVER use fire flies. Fire flies are toxic!!

Hope to hear soon that your chameleon is happily eating away again!