Drinking Water

Originally Posted by Dave W.

...... There's an old(?) saying that you haven't proven your keeping ability until you've kept a chameleon past 2 years. That's because it takes that long to slowly kill one from partial dehydration....

Howdy Jim,

Sorry for the delay in a reply - just got back in town. First, I have nothing but the utmost respect for our opinions and I've seen your photos of your great setups! I guess the point I was trying to make was, similar to what you said, there are degrees of sub-hydration and that erring on access to more water than less is often a way to prevent subtle hydration problems that could be lethal in the long run. As far as hydration studies go, the phrase: "There's and old saying..." at the beginning of that sentence was partially meant to warn the reader that this statement was not necessarily backed-up with a research paper. Since severe to chronic to partial to sub etc. hydration could take its toll from days to weeks to months etc. my point was merely to make sure that the original poster understood that just because he has made it 2 years doesn't necessarily mean that his chameleon has had optimum hydration. I guess I'm a bit hypersensitive to the hydration issue since I've seen so much death in pet stores caused by terrible hydration problems - like water dishes and waterfalls... I also worry sometimes that I might be providing too much water to my Veileds. My Panther and my Veileds are on the same schedule. Some literature indicates that Veileds have exposure to the same annual rainfall as Nosy Be' Panthers. Veileds also live in what has been described as the tropical part of Yemen. Any comment that you can provide about that would be much appreciated!