twosidedwolf
New Member
Good day so sorry to bother my wife and I just got this baby 9 week old male vale chameleon and today I made some changes to his cage by going bio active by adding some better plants organic potting soil spring tales and isopods after a struggle and intruding him to the cage he got brown and dark as different colour then he uslay is I know after I water the plants he started gaping witch means his hot and went down to the floor of the cage he kept moving up and down to the floor and high up and he still was dark my temps are between 21c (69f) to 32c (89.6) from morning to late afternoon and humidity is now a constant 34- to 45 just want to find out if it was just stress being handled so much and in a new environment we feed him crickets with calsum powder without d3 and planted the plant in the middle into the soal
Cute little one. Usually they darken in order to better absorb heat or uvb, but your temp of 32c is much too warm, especially for a little one. That would be why he was gaping. For young chameleons and girls, the temp shouldn’t be any higher than 25-26c. Adult males can be up to 29c. Are you keeping him outside? If so, you’ll need to provide more shaded area for him. Some people will put a tarp or other similar cover on half of the top and maybe a side if needed. He can overheat very quickly, which will dehydrate him. Little ones can be fragile. If it gets too hot outside, you’ll need to bring him in. As he grows into an adult, he will be needing a much larger enclosure of at least 60x60x120cm…if you can go even larger than that, perfect! If he’s kept outside, you won’t need to give him any vitamin D3 (he should get all he needs from the sun) but he should have a good multivitamin dusted on his feeders once every other week. Reptivite without D3 is a good option. I’d also suggest giving him a variety of well fed and healthy feeders. At his young age, he should be getting as much as he can eat in about 15-20 minutes, twice a day. When he reaches about 3 months old or so, you’ll want to reduce him to once a day about 20+ feeders. Then we keep reducing as he grows older. The rule of thumb for feeder size is anything larger than the space between the eyes is too big. All that info and more can be found here. 
