Tis a puzzlement

[Jeevesieb]

Hi there cham fam.

Well, I am officially stumped. Paulie has been closing his left eye, only his left eye, in the mid to late afternoons. In the morning, it's wide open. In the evenings while he cruises to a sleeping spot, it's wide open. No issues targeting food. Appetite and feces is normal. Otherwise, behavior is totally normal; basking cruising, feisty as usual.
The vet saw no sign of injury, foreign object/debris or infection. We have ruled out respiratory infection and parasites. The vet did note that the left eye does not seem to fill the turret as completely as the other eye, but noted no other concerns. I changed the UVB lamp about 3 months ago. Same type of bulb, same fixture, same placement. Vet had no concerns of issues with supplementation. Basically we are stumped and so is our very knowledgeable vet. Anyone have thoughts here? I'm adding pictures for context. I'm completely at a loss.

 

[Beman]

Can you post a few more pics of him so I can see overall body condition? And a few of the cage from lighting down? Are you using any red lighting?

 

[Jeevesieb]

UVB is Arcadia T5 7%. Here is the cage and some pictures of him. No red lighting. Just the UVB, the heat lamp and LED plant lights.

 

[Beman]

UVB is Arcadia T5 7%. Here is the cage and some pictures of him. No red lighting. Just the UVB, the heat lamp and LED plant lights.

So your biggest issue is the UVB strength. The 7% is not meant for chameleons. But I would replace the LED light your using. It is not a white light and looks to be more of a pink light. Red is damaging for their eyes. Not sure what the pink would do I just know only white light is recommended for cham cages.

More details on the 7% vs the recommended 6%

So the difference in the arcadia bulbs... You have UVB and UVA lighting from them. The 7% bulb is the shade dweller bulb so it has almost half the amount of UVA lighting as the 6% or 12% bulbs they sit at around 30% UVA vs the shadedweller 7% strength UVB bulb sitting at 17% UVA.
UVA is responsible for stimulating different aspects in a chameleon. Feeding and mating responses are linked to this.

 

[Jeevesieb]

Thank you. We will look at swapping these out.

 

[MissSkittles]

I need to add that if your bought the Arcadia ProT5 that included the 7% uvb, you won’t be able to use any other strength in it but 7%. You’ll need to get the standard T5HO to run a 6% or 5.0 strength uvb. I can’t find the thread that gave some explanation of why and only remember that one fixture (I think the 7% one) isn’t strong enough to provide the full output of a 6% uvb bulb.

 

[Beman]

Yes, this ^^^ you need an entire ProT5 set up with the 6% bulb. The shade dweller fixture which is the 7% bulb runs on a different ballast. So you have to buy everything even the correct fixture.