Hey! So we just adopted our four month old veiled chameleon (his age was told to us by the pet store owner who seemed trustworthy and very knowledgeable about chameleons) and we have had him for about three days now. From research he seems pretty healthy and normal besides the fact that he seems unusually friendly.
His basking spot is within the range that everyone here seems to deem appropriate and we feed him almost 10 crickets a day. He seems like he wants more but some say that you can over feed males so we attempt to cap it around 10. Today we attempted only feeding him 6 because someone made us feel like we should be feeding him less than 10.
His enclosure has lots of branches and vines that he seems to feel comfortable climbing and moving around on. He has enough live vegetation to eat and get water from and he gets what we think is enough vitamins.
So now to my question (sorry for the long intro, people seem to like details on this forum so I thought I would give a good summary of his short life with us thus far. OK so I've seen him yawn and once heard him hiss very softly at a hose that was about to be installed in his cage for the automatic misting thing we got. But today, just after I turned all the lights out, he made a sort of puff noise. Almost like a teeny tiny sneeze. The lights were off and I was a little bit away from the enclosure so I couldn't see exactly what behaviour he was doing while he made the noise. After I heard it, I went over to the cage to get a closer look and he seemed to be doing the sort of thing that dogs do before they go to bed where he was walking around, adjusting on his favorite spot until he seemed to find a good position then he lied down and looked like he does when he's sleeping.
I feel like I've heard that noises after lights out is bad but have not seen what that is. Is it a sneeze? I've seen him yawn before and he sort of makes a similar quiet noise. Do we think he yawned after the lights went out?
P.S. I've seen a lot of people saying that chameleons don't yawn, they jaw stretch. But can we all just realize that yawning and face stretches are kinda the same thing? Like technically we humans are stretching our faces when we yawn so if replies could be free of that cute little debate about what exactly that thing is it would be much appreciated
His basking spot is within the range that everyone here seems to deem appropriate and we feed him almost 10 crickets a day. He seems like he wants more but some say that you can over feed males so we attempt to cap it around 10. Today we attempted only feeding him 6 because someone made us feel like we should be feeding him less than 10.
His enclosure has lots of branches and vines that he seems to feel comfortable climbing and moving around on. He has enough live vegetation to eat and get water from and he gets what we think is enough vitamins.
So now to my question (sorry for the long intro, people seem to like details on this forum so I thought I would give a good summary of his short life with us thus far. OK so I've seen him yawn and once heard him hiss very softly at a hose that was about to be installed in his cage for the automatic misting thing we got. But today, just after I turned all the lights out, he made a sort of puff noise. Almost like a teeny tiny sneeze. The lights were off and I was a little bit away from the enclosure so I couldn't see exactly what behaviour he was doing while he made the noise. After I heard it, I went over to the cage to get a closer look and he seemed to be doing the sort of thing that dogs do before they go to bed where he was walking around, adjusting on his favorite spot until he seemed to find a good position then he lied down and looked like he does when he's sleeping.
I feel like I've heard that noises after lights out is bad but have not seen what that is. Is it a sneeze? I've seen him yawn before and he sort of makes a similar quiet noise. Do we think he yawned after the lights went out?
P.S. I've seen a lot of people saying that chameleons don't yawn, they jaw stretch. But can we all just realize that yawning and face stretches are kinda the same thing? Like technically we humans are stretching our faces when we yawn so if replies could be free of that cute little debate about what exactly that thing is it would be much appreciated
