jajeanpierre
Chameleon Enthusiast
She looks pretty exhausted which is to be expected. How soon after her covering up the eggs did you take those pictures? Do you see how limp her tail looks in all the pictures? That suggests to me she is not doing very well.
What she needs right now is for you to leave her alone and not handle her. She needs a lot of water, food and calcium. Your cage is very bare so she will not be getting access to much water from the leaves. My cages are full of live plants and after a female has laid I run misters a lot so the leaves are always soaked and dripping. A shower and a dripper are not good enough.
How are you supplementing calcium for her? She can only absorb so much calcium from her gut at any one time so you should be giving her calcium twice a day.
She also has what looks like gular edema, something veileds are not noted to be all that susceptible to. Has she always had it? If it is related to her being gravid, I would expect it to go away very quickly.
I'm sorry I can't share your enthusiasm for the beautiful process of egg laying that kills probably every female veiled that hatches and makes it to maturity. Have a good look at her--does she look like she is happy and doing well? She looks like she is miserable. Egg laying is REALLY hard on captive chameleons. Anything that is so hard on them is not something I like my animals to go through. She produced a clutch that is twice the size of a clutch she would produce in the wild, which is sort of typical of captive veileds. It takes its toll on them. She loaded up those eggs with Vitamin A and calcium to last the babies that don't exist for months. She was probably nutritionally deficient to begin with and didn't have that extra nutrition to put into the eggs. Do you see where I'm going with this? I am coming to the conclusion that perhaps all female veileds and panthers should be culled at hatch to prevent the inevitable horrible end they will likely all come to. I've read too many threads about female veileds full of eggs with broken legs from MBD and the owner not doing the right thing and ending their misery or even noticing they have broken legs.
She is not out of the woods yet. She needs extra care. Once she has recovered she needs to be kept much cooler and very lean to try to not put her in breeding condition. With ample food, veileds produce huge clutches which shortens their lives. By the way, she doesn't look skinny to me, so once she is back to her normal self, don't hesitate to cut her food right down. Most chameleons pictured on the forum here are obese, even some of mine.
