Does this chameleon look healthy?

Jakama

Member
I have been a chameleon owner for about a month. When I first purchased my chameleon, I had very poor husbandry- poor light placement, not enough foliage, only fed her mealworms, used substrate, etc. Over the past month, however, I have been taking numerous suggestions from this community and have gotten my husbandry to an acceptable level, I think. Despite this, I have not been an owner for long enough to be particularly confident in my abilities, and I figured that, after all these renovations, it would be fitting to check with the community to see if there are any more changes I need to make before I can settle in and relax.
Mainly what concerns me now is that she looks a bit thin, and that I have noticed a bulge that seems like it might be eggs, but she does not have yellow spots on her sides. Also, she gets a black and white-ish coloration whenever she goes up to her basking spot, which I have heard means that a chameleon is stressed.

Info sheet:
Female veiled chameleon, about five months old. Owned her for four weeks. I handle her about one time every week. I feed her medium to large crickets- about ten per day on a normal day. I feed the crickets fresh carrots and green beans, with the occasional mango slice. I dust them with Zoomed Repti Calcium without D3, and twice a month with Calcium with D3. Soon I will be purchasing multivitamins as another dusting supplement, which I will use twice a month. I mist her twice a day with hot water (comes out lukewarm), and I have a cup of water with a hole in it that I fill up about once a day. I do see her drinking water from this. Fecal matter is dark brown, sometimes with a white section. I have never tested her for parasites. She received a burn on her left side on the second day we got her, but the situation that caused this has been remedied- I moved the lamp.
Cage is about 24x24x36 inches, wire mesh. During the day, I use a 60W house lamp and a 15W UVB tube lamp (33% UVA, 10% UVB). At night it gets pretty cold, so I use a space heater to keep the temperature at about 60 degrees. I switch it to daytime lighting at around 8:00 AM, and switch it to nighttime lighting at around 8:00 PM. I am using two live ficus in my enclosure, as well as a climbing vine, a large piece of driftwood, a piece of bamboo with numerous shoots, and a fake bush. I keep the temperature in the enclosure between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and I try and keep the humidity at around 60%. The temperature of her basking spot is about 80 degrees. The table that the enclosure is resting on is about three feet off of the floor. I keep her enclosure in my room, and people do tend to walk around this room several times a day. This provides the advantage of being able to keep an eye on her throughout the day. Her enclosure is next to a window, so she gets plenty of natural light during the day in addition to her two normal lights. This window is always closed, but I keep the blinds open. The sun never shines directly through this window. I am located in Sonoma County in California. I live about an hour north of San Francisco.


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P.S. Sorry about asking all these questions, I really appreciate your guys' input.
 
I would double check on other threads about how much you're feeding her. I'm not sure but seems like a lot for a five month old female, I know you have to be extra careful with females around egg bearing age.
Also double check the plant threads about your plants - I've seen mention cautions about bamboo before, do a search. And if that climbing vine is a plant, not just a fake vine. Keep a watch on your fake plants too, seems to me veileds are known as big vegetation eaters, so they might try eating fake plants too.
Also might want to check gutloading veggie charts, as I don't recall making a mental note to include green beans as a possibility so that might have been because it had oxalates or something.
One more thing, just clarify what you meant by switch to night lighting. That should mean no lighting at all, right?
 
Sorry for the confusion, night lighting does indeed mean no lighting at all. The climbing vine is just a vine, no foliage. I am somewhat ambivalent about the one fake plant I have in there, cuz it's not very useful. She rarely goes over there, and there are no bite marks on it, so I think it's pretty safe. I mostly just use it for misting purposes, helps keep humidity up.
http://www.greenigsociety.org/foodchart.htm I was told to use this chart to help determine what food is good for gutloading, and green beans are listed as a staple food.
I asked the community about bamboo, and I was told that, as long as it isn't lucky bamboo, I'm good, and it isn't.
That is good advice on feeding. Maybe eight a day is good?
 
Okay that sounds good about the other stuff then. I don like green beans so I probably figured if I had them around for crickets my husband would make them for supper. Lol.
Anyways, yeah I would definitely read up more on how much to feed. I wish I could be more helpful but I skipped over some of the girly stuff in my research since I had a boy. But I know at some point you're supposed to switch even boys down in amount and every other day, but with girls ts even more important because the food affects when and how many eggs they produce and doing so when still young can stress their bodies more, affect their own growth, etc. So for sure look that up and pay extra attention to what you're feeding her and when.
 
She's very pretty. She's also of egg bearing age. I might have missed it if you listed it, but you should have a laying bin in there for her.
 
Oops, forgot to put that in the description. I have a plastic pot in the enclosure, about nine or ten inches high with an eight inch diameter, filled with moist sand. I know that she has been inspecting this sand, since the sand has a large number of footprints in it. If she was pregnant it would explain a lot of her physical attributes currently, but she's not displaying the yellow spots on her sides! She has a fairly visible lump above her back legs, do chameleons ever get this gravid without taking on the black and yellow coloration?
 
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