Herocleasin
New Member
- My chameleon (Archie) is a veiled, at least 7 months old.
- I handle my chameleon once a week
- I feed Archie 5 crickets a day, or try to at least, and I’ve fed him 4 house flies now, that’s the only food that sticks out (I also feed him crickets w/ calcium supplement more often than that). Recently I gave him his first superworms, about 6 days ago, and that is only because my local cricket supplier was out of crickets, and the crickets take a while to ship. He easily ate the superworms, and I gave him 3 a day for 3 days.
- I use Rep-Cal calcium supplement (I use the one in the middle at every meal)
- His feces was recently weirdly brown with a somewhat whitish hue, and it looked like it had somewhat of a cobblestone-like texture to it with a whitish-orange substrate
- No other interesting history other than the fact that I got him from Petsmart
- He has a glass cage, but I've been told that's not good so I'm soon switching to a screen cage
- Not sure of the brand of the lights, I can’t check right now but I’m pretty sure his basking light is only like 10 watts.
- The humidity of his cage is a good as possible.
- All fake plants
- Unfortunately my cage is under an air vent, but it seems to go right over his cage (the temperature in his cage when I’m gone during the day is about 78°F and during the night about 70°F
- North Carolina is where I’m locating, very rural countryside neighborhood.
The current problem: A few things actually.
- He seems to have lost his appetite. He hasn't eaten for 2 days now, which is highly unusual from him. I've heard that it is not too uncommon for a chameleon to reject food sometimes, but Archie has never looked at food and not want it before. Something to note is that I recently got a size smaller from the crickets I usually give him by accident, but I didn't think that would be too big of a deal seeing as though I can just give him more. I usually buy the "large crickets" from my local supplier, but he didn't have any crickets at all, so when I went to order them online I bought what I thought were large crickets, but they turned out not to be so large.
- He seems to not be moving around very often. This is another thing pretty unusual from Archie. Usually he moves around his cage a ton, and often times when I would stick my hand in the cage, he would rush to it. Recently he's been sitting in one of two spots in his cage throughout the entire day.
- Shed skin not coming off. I've definitely heard of reptiles having a hard time with shedding skin, and I know there are some sort of supplements for it, but it still seems weird. It's been like a week and a half now and he still has a bit of dead skin stuck to his head.
- His feces looks kind of weird to me. As I described in his feces information, his feces looks brown, but with a certain whiteness to it, and a stone-like texture sort of. His substrate was whitish-orange, mostly white, and I'm pretty sure that's quite common.
- He has a bulge on his lower lip. I noticed this bulge about 6 days ago, when I gave him his first superworm. The bulge has now persisted for 6 days, although it looked a lot worse on the 4th day or so than it does now. This "bulge" doesn't seem to irritate him too much.
- His color is constantly dark. Now this is a little extra concern, meaning I'm not as concerned about this one as the rest, but still concerned none the less. Its come to me recently that Archie is always sort of a brown color. Now I know chameleons turn dark for multiple reasons, such as to absorb sunlight, but when comparing Archie to other healthy chameleons I see online, I notice how Archie never really looks as vibrant as some others do.
Probably the most concerning thing to me is his loss of appetite. Usually Archie is a very avid eater, so seeing him reject food for two days is a little unsettling.
I've never taken Archie to the vet before, so if that's what I'm going to have to do I'm not sure how to go about it.
