Turn to be green
- Thread starter sunday
- Start date
jr andrade
New Member
IDK! but thats a gorgeous chameleon!
chameleon884
Member
i think it might be female. mainly because of the size of it. male parsons grow to be about 2 feet long. sorry but i dont think the cham is 2 feet long!
also maybe the casque is small. males casques grow much larger.
one reason i might think its male is because of the tail base. it is sort of thick and you can see (or maybe its just me) you can see a little bulge of where the hemipenes are.
i really dont know!
she/he is a beautiful chameleon. most parsons are blue, green and orange around the eyes and lips. ive never seen that shade of green though!
also maybe the casque is small. males casques grow much larger.one reason i might think its male is because of the tail base. it is sort of thick and you can see (or maybe its just me) you can see a little bulge of where the hemipenes are.
i really dont know!
she/he is a beautiful chameleon. most parsons are blue, green and orange around the eyes and lips. ive never seen that shade of green though!
SageZA
New Member
Seriously that last pic looks photoshoped but that Parsons is awesome. I love those guys cant w8 for some to get to South Africa :0 market hasnt boomed much here yet
But can we get them here atm?
Chris Anderson
Dr. House of Chameleons
chameleon884 - Unfortunately, none of the criteria you mentioned are very good indicators of sex for C. parsonii at this age. Sexing them can be quite difficult in the first 8 or so months since their sexual characters are slower to develop than many species and are more subtle at this stage.
While male C. parsonii do get quite large, it takes them a couple years to reach full size and females do get a reasonable size at well. An adult female C. parsonii is as large or larger than most adult male F. pardalis you see. Since this animal is only 5.5 months old, you can't really use size as a determination at this point and even as an older animal, it would be difficult to use this as an indicator without other clues.
As far as the casque size goes, while male C. parsonii do tend to have more sharply developed casques as adults, this is not as strong of an indicator as it is in Ch. calyptratus and there can be quite a bit of variation. In particular, immature to subadult males often have casques that are quite similar to adult females and occasionally you will see females with fairly well developed casques. At this age, there really is not a noticeable difference as far as I can tell.
Unlike F. pardalis and many other species, C. parsonii can be difficult to sex based on hemipenal bulge. Because they are such a heavy bodies species, any swelling of the tail base can be difficult to differentiate. They also seem to have a much less pronounced bulge compared to many species anyway, particularly at a young age.
As for the development of the rostral protuberances, when young, some females have rostral crests that look like they are poised to develop into a full blown rostral process and some males have almost nothing. This is definitely used as an indicator in developing C. parsonii, but its one that can be tricky, particularly when they haven't started developing more adult coloration.
As you can gather, sexing C. parsonii at this age can be quite difficult with this suite of slowly developing characters. You really have to look at a series of subtle indicators (overall coloration, pattern coloration, eye turret coloration, rostral development, etc.) together to really make any type of guess and even still, its not difficult to be wrong.
sunday - Do you have any pics of him/her in rest coloration (without the dark banding) to compare with these?
Chris
While male C. parsonii do get quite large, it takes them a couple years to reach full size and females do get a reasonable size at well. An adult female C. parsonii is as large or larger than most adult male F. pardalis you see. Since this animal is only 5.5 months old, you can't really use size as a determination at this point and even as an older animal, it would be difficult to use this as an indicator without other clues.
As far as the casque size goes, while male C. parsonii do tend to have more sharply developed casques as adults, this is not as strong of an indicator as it is in Ch. calyptratus and there can be quite a bit of variation. In particular, immature to subadult males often have casques that are quite similar to adult females and occasionally you will see females with fairly well developed casques. At this age, there really is not a noticeable difference as far as I can tell.
Unlike F. pardalis and many other species, C. parsonii can be difficult to sex based on hemipenal bulge. Because they are such a heavy bodies species, any swelling of the tail base can be difficult to differentiate. They also seem to have a much less pronounced bulge compared to many species anyway, particularly at a young age.
As for the development of the rostral protuberances, when young, some females have rostral crests that look like they are poised to develop into a full blown rostral process and some males have almost nothing. This is definitely used as an indicator in developing C. parsonii, but its one that can be tricky, particularly when they haven't started developing more adult coloration.
As you can gather, sexing C. parsonii at this age can be quite difficult with this suite of slowly developing characters. You really have to look at a series of subtle indicators (overall coloration, pattern coloration, eye turret coloration, rostral development, etc.) together to really make any type of guess and even still, its not difficult to be wrong.
sunday - Do you have any pics of him/her in rest coloration (without the dark banding) to compare with these?
Chris
chameleon884
Member
neat!
are you like a pro/ expert chameleon keeper? thanks for the explanation, it was interesting.
RobandJess
New Member
i love parsons, especially yours. Amazing colors!
Texas Panther Man
New Member
Hey Sunday, Glad to see some updated pics of your baby parsons. He/She has grown quite a bit and has even colored up some too. So how hard is it to find feeders in Thailand? Do you raise your own or what? Is this your only chameleon or do you have some other species?
morpheon
New Member
neat!
You can find Chris' Curriculum Vitae here: http://www.chamaeleonidae.com/Curriculum_Vitae.html . I'll let you judge by yourself!
(Chris: if it bothers you that i showed your CV online, just send me a private message and i'll gladly edit my post... I just assumed that since your CV is online and really easy to find from your website you wouldn't mind! But i can be wrong and it wouldn't be the first time!)
sunday
Member
I'm not raise any feeders. Crickets, mealworm, superworm and waxworm are sell in pet mart. Sometime I catch Locus and grasshopper to feed them. I have only Parsonii, this baby and sub adult male.
