All,
First, thanks ahead of time for the help and advice, our Penelope is a sick little lady. We have an appointment with a vet tomorrow. He says he has some chameleon experience but we live in a small town so I am guessing his experience is limited. So, I need advice from all of you experts out there.
Here is a brief overview with more detail below. I am pretty sure I have screwed up and she has MBD and/or is egg bound. Her legs are very weak and she has poor motor control and a bloated tummy. She is still pooping well (good color, texture) but she is weak and can’t climb. She has spent the last 4 days on the floor of her cage. I am feeling like a monster for letting Penelope get sick.
Penelope is my first female cham, I had a male Senegal (Louis) in college that I got when he was an adult. He lived a long, healthy life so I had a false sense of confidence when we got Penelope. I had been following the same techniques I used for Louis for feeding and supplementing. Now that she is sick, I am worried that I haven’t been supplementing enough calcium for Penelope to keep up with a growing juvenile. She’s my first female, I’m not good at recognizing signs of egg-bound so that might be part of the problem too.
Chameleon Info:
Cage Info:
Here she is with her tummy looking bloated. A top, bottom, and front view (with the thought that someone with more experience than me might be able to tell if egg-bound is the problem):
Here are a couple of pictures of the back right leg that has me concerned:
These photos don't do a great job of showing how that back right leg is behaving oddly. The nearest explanation I can think of is that it looks the "palm of her hand" is rotating upward as if you were holding out your arm to the side with the palm facing up:
Finally, here is a picture of her just a month ago when she was happy and hanging out in the sun:
First, thanks ahead of time for the help and advice, our Penelope is a sick little lady. We have an appointment with a vet tomorrow. He says he has some chameleon experience but we live in a small town so I am guessing his experience is limited. So, I need advice from all of you experts out there.
Here is a brief overview with more detail below. I am pretty sure I have screwed up and she has MBD and/or is egg bound. Her legs are very weak and she has poor motor control and a bloated tummy. She is still pooping well (good color, texture) but she is weak and can’t climb. She has spent the last 4 days on the floor of her cage. I am feeling like a monster for letting Penelope get sick.
Penelope is my first female cham, I had a male Senegal (Louis) in college that I got when he was an adult. He lived a long, healthy life so I had a false sense of confidence when we got Penelope. I had been following the same techniques I used for Louis for feeding and supplementing. Now that she is sick, I am worried that I haven’t been supplementing enough calcium for Penelope to keep up with a growing juvenile. She’s my first female, I’m not good at recognizing signs of egg-bound so that might be part of the problem too.
Chameleon Info:
- Your Chameleon – Female Amilobe Panther, 7 months old. I have had her for about 4 months.
- Handling – When she was healthy, we would hold her about twice a week. For the past 4 days, I have been holding her twice a day as I force feed some mashed up crickets, water, calcium powder.
- Feeding – She was eating 8-10 large crickets every day and loved to eat. I gut load my crickets with dark, leafy greens. She ate well until 2 weeks ago, her appetite slowly diminished until I was only seeing her eat 1-2 crickets at a feeding. I continued to shake loose crickets into the cage and those would disappear over the course of the day so I figured she was hunting them. Last week, she stopped eating completely and moved to the floor of her cage 4 days ago. I have been worried about dehydration/starvation so for the last 4 days I have been mashing up 3-4 crickets and mixing those with a little water and calcium powder and using a baby medicine syringe to force feed.
- Supplements – I think I was under supplementing. I was dusting her crickets once per week with calcium with D3 from Petco. For the last 4 days, I have been giving calcium daily with the cricket mash that I am force feeding.
- Watering – I mist her twice a day very heavily as well as all of the plants in her cage and the walls. When she was healthy, she would go down from her favorite stick to the leaves to lick up water. She would also drink the drips from the top of the mesh of her cage and I would use my sprayer to gently drop additional droplets of water onto the mesh until she got her fill. I also have an automatic mister that I set up to run for 2 minutes every 8 hours when I know I am going to have a long day at the office.
- Fecal Description – Her last dropping was yesterday. It is moist with a milk chocolate color and nice white urates. I haven’t ever tested for parasites.
- History – I got her in January and she arrived very healthy and vibrant. Up until 2-3 weeks ago, she was happy and eating like a pig. She has shed twice and each time, she finished the entire shedding in a less than a day, which I also took as a good sign. She has fallen over the edge health-wise over the last 2 weeks.
Cage Info:
- Cage Type – A combination of an acrylic box (18”w x 40”l x 18” tall) with an 18”w x 18”l x 36”tall mesh enclosure attached on top of one side. The mesh section has a good number of branches and plants so she has lots of options for basking at various distances from her lamps and in the sun. I included a photo below.
- Lighting – I have a ZooMed UVB bulb as well as a heat bulb on the top of the mesh part of her cage. Those are set to run from 7:30am until 7:30pm. Her cage is near a window so this time of year, she is getting ambient light from the outdoors until the sun sets around 8pm. Her cage is also next to a window so she has a couple spots in her mesh cage where she can climb down to sticks that get direct sunlight for a good part of the day.
- Temperature – The temp of the cage varies from about 75 up to 82 depending on the location. Down at the floor of the cage, it is 75 almost all the time. At her favorite stick near the heat lamp, it is reaches around 82 where I hang the thermometer under it. Now that she is spending her day on the floor of the cage, I bought a Repti-therm cage heating pad that I mounted on the outside of the cage right where she lays on the ground. The temp right by her on the ground is reading 75 degrees. I have been worried that is a little low so I have been having my kids hold her gently for about an hour daily she can rest her tummy on them and get warm that way too.
- Humidity – I’m not measuring my humidity levels. I mist manually twice a day and use an automatic mister when I know I will miss a misting. I also have a fountain down in the acrylic side of the cage to get some moisture via evaporation.
- Plants – I have four live plants. A small bromeliad, a jade tree, a schefflera arboricola, and a small clusia major
- Placement – The cage is located in the corner of our living room (medium to low traffic area). When comes to air flow, there is a heat vent in the floor about two feet from the base of her cage. The top of the cage is about 5 ft from the floor.
- Location – NW Iowa.
Current Problem – Penelope’s condition has plummeted over the last week. She has been healthy, active, and eating like a pig until about 2-3 weeks ago when her appetite started to taper off. 2 weeks ago, her appetite really plummeted and I was only seeing her eat 1-2 crickets at a time. Previously, she would eat 5-6 in the morning and another 4-5 in the afternoon. It has been about 5 days since I last saw her eat a whole cricket on her own so I have been force feeding mushed up cricket liquid twice a day now for the last 4 days. I have been adding calcium to the mush once a day because I am worried about MBD and want to build her calcium levels back up. When I force feed, I am gently using a guitar pick to force her mouth open and then I have a small infant medicine syringe that I use to drop the mush liquid into her mouth. She definitely doesn’t like it and gets super mad at me but I don’t want her condition to continue to get worse due to dehydration and starvation.
Her grip in her hands and tail is strong but her legs are weak and she doesn’t like to support herself. She will try to climb a little from the floor of her cage but can only pull the front half of herself up before she has to give up. Her right, back leg in particular seems odd. She has very poor motor control with that leg and looks like it wants to twist out. I was worried she had fallen and hurt it but when I gently touch it, nothing feels off and she doesn’t show any pain or reaction other than her standard look of frustration at me touching her. Also, her motor control with her tail seems spastic and she isn’t precise with it when looking for something to hold onto, it swings around like an angry snake until it finds something to wind around and then it cranks down tight.
The bloated tummy made me worry about her being egg-bound. She is my first female, so I am clueless in this area. I read a bunch of the egg-bound threads on the forum and looked at the photos and I don’t see or feel any “egg lumps” so I am not sure. I have no experience with female chams so I don’t have a good feel for what I should be looking for.
All this, the weakness in the legs, the lethargy, the bloating, and what I have read on the forums has led me to believe I haven’t been supplementing enough calcium and she has gotten MBD because of my ineptitude. Or, she is egg-bound and also has MBD because I haven’t been giving enough calcium as she was making the egg shells.
I think I was spoiled by how easy my male Senegal was. I rarely supplemented, depending on a good gutloading for his crickets instead, and he was strong and healthy for the nearly 4 years he lived after I got him. Knowing that I had done well with him, I was confident when Penelope arrived and she did so well for the first 3 months that I thought I was in the groove. These last few weeks of her getting sicker has been heartbreaking to watch and has made me feel like an absolute jerk.
I have also attached quite a few pictures, trying in particular to show her bloated tummy and her right back leg. She is showing her angry colors in a couple of the photos because I took them after a force feeding this morning.
Any help and advice is greatly appreciated. (and if you read all of this, thanks for sticking with me)
Here she is with her tummy looking bloated. A top, bottom, and front view (with the thought that someone with more experience than me might be able to tell if egg-bound is the problem):
Here are a couple of pictures of the back right leg that has me concerned:
These photos don't do a great job of showing how that back right leg is behaving oddly. The nearest explanation I can think of is that it looks the "palm of her hand" is rotating upward as if you were holding out your arm to the side with the palm facing up:
Finally, here is a picture of her just a month ago when she was happy and hanging out in the sun:
