Season five of the Chameleon Academy Podcast has officially begun!
(Yes, there has been a name change. I needed to tie together my various outreach efforts under one name and chose Chameleon Academy to be the rallying point. Everything will be switching from Chameleon Breeder to Chameleon Academy. Sorry for the confusion, but this will be a good thing!)
As many of you know, I have a special passion for taking our chameleon husbandry from putting a chameleon in a ficus tree and wrapping a cage around it to viewing our efforts as creating an entire vibrant environment. My personal approach is not to make one awesome cage and then use that as a shining example, but to make baby steps over the years that the entire community can follow. Keeping plants alive is a huge step in that direction. So I picked two themes this year. The first is the Plants Alive! challenge where anyone wanting to do this with me picks a plant challenge to work on over the year. Some people will just want to figure out how to keep a Pothos alive! I, personally, would really like to learn how to have my Maiden Hair Fern thrive. I am able to keep them alive, but I feel I could do so much more. So that is my personal goal. I can claim victory if, by the end of the year, I can post an image of a Maiden Hair Fern that is bigger and bushier than when I got it!
The other co-theme is UVB education. UVB is pretty confusing, in no small part due to it being invisible. But it is critical to the health of our chameleons! So it is worth understanding not only the science behind it, but how to use the tools we have available to create a proper UVB application for our chameleons. That will be a constant theme over the 2020 episodes. The goal is that we have a deep understanding of UVB application by the end of season five.
And then, finally, John Courteney-Smith from Arcadia Reptile joins me to talk about the new ProT5 UVB fixture. I just got mine in and am testing them. I'll share results in a couple of months, but until then this is a good start. What I am most looking forward to is someone who cares about the health of the lamp specifying the internal protection circuitry specs.
So I invite you to listen in and join me for another year of bopping around our chameleon world!
You can listen to the podcast in a number of ways
1) On your smartphone there will be a podcast app. Just search for the Chameleon Academy Podcast and you'll find it!
2) If you have an iPhone there is a dedicated app that holds all the episodes. At this time it is still under Chameleon Breeder so search that name, but the transition to Chameleon Academy should happen next week. And, the Android app is on its way!
3) You can listen through iHeartRadio, stitcher, or any other podcast service
4) You an listen online at https://chameleonacademy.com/ep-135-season-5-kick-off/
5) OR, you can listen right here inside Chameleon Forums due to the programming skills of @Brad who got the link system working for me to post the episode player right here!
We are off and running!
