Furcifer minor, from Madagascar, has the distinction of having the most dramatic gravid coloration. If you saw a gravid female and a non-gravid female you wouldn’t know they were the same individual. And if you saw a male and a female you would think they were different species. Furcifer minor has variety! This wonderful little chameleon is exceedingly rare in captivity, but there are successful breeding groups and their numbers are growing. Today we talk with Frank Payne who is a leader in the effort to establish Furcifer minor in captivity!

Trioceros montium. The two horned chameleon. The mountain chameleon. Is one of those incredibly decorated Cameroon chameleon species with crests and horns. It is no longer imported, but there are small pockets of breeders working with it. One of them is the team of Tyler Gordon and Kristen Zeller at Cage the Chameleons in Medicine Hat, Alberta Canada. Today we talk to this dynamic duo about their work with this rare chameleon.

One of the basic environmental husbandry conditions is humidity. This is one of the more difficult of our conditions to dial in. In this episode we talk with Mario Jungman from the Netherlands about how he has refined his husbandry with humidity as a critical element.

In the first part of this series we talked about the natural history of Trioceros melleri and the housing strategy. Today we will talk about husbandry. And that is how you set up their cage to replicate the conditions they need as well as nutrition. Our three breeders are back to help us get started in the right direction. Dale Tamura from the United States, Martine Desjardins from Canada, and James Killey from the United Kingdom share their hard won elements of success.

To start off, I’d like to say that much of what we go over is the same husbandry that you would perform for any chameleon. We are going to start at the beginning so we are comprehensive. But it won’t be long before some of you who have been around for a bit will start thinking that this care information sounds suspiciously similar to the care information I share about just about any other chameleon species. And that is because Meller’s Chameleons are….chameleons. Just like most other chameleons, once you dial in the basics the difference between species is just some subtle shifts. Tweak day time humidity and set the right night and day temperature levels and figure the appropriate UVB levels you’ve taken care of the bulk of the species available to us. That said, we are going to start at the beginning and work our way forward.