Veileds and plants

kinyonga said:
Are all chameleon digestive tracts the same...meaning short?. Does anyone have any articles on this?

If veiled chameleons eat the greens for the reason Petr Necas says...then why do (usually gravid) female veileds strip pothos plants bare but males don't?
Click to expand...
No papers to share here, and I sympathize with the critical position. I was actually trying to find some articles here. I always default to peer reviewed journals/papers, and I almost pulled the trigger on a UK vet journal, but I thought, $600 would get me half a deposit on a pair of wc parsons, and...well...you know.
 
My limited understanding of the basics physiology of digestion is: food is broken down by chewing and saliva. Further broken down in the stomach by acids. This slurry passes through the intestines where nutrients and water is extracted. Then poop happens. So to my unedumacated thought process, do veileds have an enzyme either in their saliva or stomach acids to help them to break down plant matter? My girls eat their plants a lot and I am yet to see any undigested plant matter in their poop.
I was thinking along the lines of the oxalate crystals maybe having something to do with helping break down and digest plants. As I Googled to verify my memory of oxalate crystal form, I maybe found your answer @kinyonga re: why gravid females strip their pathos...I guess oxalates bind with calcium in the plants. Does this mean they are giving themselves a little calcium boost by eating the pothos?
 
@MissSkittles thanks for looking up oxalates...to the best of my knowledge oxalates (as you know) bind calcium and make it unusable.... Which makes me wonder why female veiled chameleons eat the pothos so much when they are gravid.

I've been searching for enzymes and length of the digestive system in veileds compared to say Panther chameleons to see if their system is likely to be adapted to plant digestion...no luck. I did find one really good paper on guts of omnivores, herbivores and carnivores...but I can't find it now. Grr.

Back to my researching.
 
My six month old veilds eat grated squash, maybe for the moisture? However, they get dripped water for onehalf hour five times daily. They also get crickets and superworms. They take bites out of pothos leaves. I am growing bean plants and will offer some potted plants and see if they any bean vegetation. During the summer I give them wild caught night flying insects, mostly moths. A pathologist recently posted that insects are not vectors of any chameleon parasites. They don't show much interest in thawed vegetable mixtures that come in frozen packages from the grocery store. During the summer, I offer tender dandelion leaves.
 
I don't know if this is just a Veiled thing. I have 3 and only one is REALLY into eating plants. And this one has just discovered that there is a BlackBerry in the homemade feeders that I'm using meant to feed the crickets while they are there. He eats the crickets, then climbs into the feeder and eats the BlackBerry.
 
There’s some really good photos by Strand and Coke. I’ll site them in my upcoming article. Basically, if you look at the small intestine length vs that of the stomach, chameleons—at least t. deremensis, have a very short digestive tract. Indeed, compared to herbivorous reptiles such as green iguanas, it is woefully so.
 
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