I’ll certainly defer to you here. I was recently listening to a podcast where it was explained that veileds eat plants when there isn’t enough indigestible insect parts in their diet. The reason, as I understand it, is that the chameleon gut doesn’t have turns and bends like our guts. This makes it difficult for the muscles that control the guts to push through a soft diet. It was explained that the hard, indigestible parts of bugs—legs, chitin, etc—actually give the guts something to grab onto to force the food through. In the absence of such items—for instance, when a wild chameleon is feeding heavily on caterpillars, or a captive is fed too many soft worms—the chameleon will eat plant matter to act as the stuff to pull the rest of the food through the gut. Again, this is just what was explained on the podcast.
