Chameleon died, please help me figure out why
- Thread starter Holvure
- Start date
jajeanpierre
Chameleon Enthusiast
@Holvure I'm sorry for your loss.
It sounds like gout--based on your description of bumps appearing on his tail and joint pain. Since your vet had seen the bumps, I would have to think it wasn't abscesses.
Gout is usually caused by kidney failure. It can be caused by feeding too much high-quality protein from things like feeder mice. Most gout in chameleons is caused by kidney failure. Most kidney failure is caused by dehydration. A single episode of severe dehydration can do enough damage that months or years later, the animal will die of kidney failure. Starvation will also cause kidney failure. Improper temps will cause lots of kidney problems, too.
This might have happened before you got him or from chronic dehydration in your care. It is one of the reasons I always push everyone to have a good automatic mister because hand misting is just not nearly as good and chronic dehydration is a huge problem for captive chameleons.
Again, I am sorry for your loss.
It sounds like gout--based on your description of bumps appearing on his tail and joint pain. Since your vet had seen the bumps, I would have to think it wasn't abscesses.
Gout is usually caused by kidney failure. It can be caused by feeding too much high-quality protein from things like feeder mice. Most gout in chameleons is caused by kidney failure. Most kidney failure is caused by dehydration. A single episode of severe dehydration can do enough damage that months or years later, the animal will die of kidney failure. Starvation will also cause kidney failure. Improper temps will cause lots of kidney problems, too.
This might have happened before you got him or from chronic dehydration in your care. It is one of the reasons I always push everyone to have a good automatic mister because hand misting is just not nearly as good and chronic dehydration is a huge problem for captive chameleons.
Again, I am sorry for your loss.
Mawtyplant
Chameleon Enthusiast
Hello,
Really sorry for your lost i just have some question for you to help finding some clues:/
You have a picture of the cage?
What kind of UVB bulb are you using?
Did you wash your hand everytime before manipulate your animal?
Thank you
Really sorry for your lost i just have some question for you to help finding some clues:/
You have a picture of the cage?
What kind of UVB bulb are you using?
Did you wash your hand everytime before manipulate your animal?
Thank you
kelly_girl199
Avid Member
Mine wants out on almost a daily bases. So I handle alot.BUT he only wants me to get to his free range. I hold him for a few seconds and thats about it. Yesterday he wants off his free range so He climbs down the branch and onto my hanging purses.I put my hand out let him step on, he went right back to his cage. Not all chameleons are like that. But from what I have seen chameleons dont prefer to be handles.They use you to get out and explore lol!!
jajeanpierre
Chameleon Enthusiast
A necropsy is not cheap. I open up everything that dies whether it is a chameleon or an old laying hen so I can get an idea of the health of my group of animals. The more animals I open up and look at (and send photos off to a friend who is an avian research vet with a lot of experience with reptiles), the more I learn about what normal looks like. I have a lot of animals, so herd health is important to me. It also tells me a lot about my husbandry.
I recently lost a wonderful wild caught to gout almost two years after import. When I opened him up, I didn't like the way his liver looked so I packed him up and took him to the vet who send samples off for histopathology. The final bill was something like $300 or $350. Just having a vet look at your dead chameleon will cost about $100 without pathology. It is understandable that as a single pet owner, you wouldn't do a necropsy.
Based on your description, I--and it seems your vet--is inclined to think gout. Gout can be caused by too much protein in their diet such as feeding vegetarian lizards cat food. If you are feeding an insect diet, that isn't the case. That leaves kidney failure which is very very common in captive chameleons.
Kidney damage does not show itself at the time of the initial damage. It takes a lot of time to develop. A simplified explanation (simplified because I don't have a free hour to pull out my trusty reptile veterinary textbook and research gout for you) is that the tubules in the kidneys become blocked and don't do their job in pulling urates out of the blood stream.
Urates are the end product of chameleon protein metabolism. Mammals have a different mechanism and produce urine to eliminate nitrogen (from protein). Urates, as you know from cleaning your cage are not very water soluble so when they build up in the blood stream they end up precipitating out somewhere. It can be in the joints or in other tissues--lungs, liver, kidneys, testes, intestines. They form tophi (Latin for "stones) in the body, often in the joints or in the tissues. They do not usually show up on x-ray the same way that bone does. So, it is quite plausible that the x-ray your vet took would not show big deposits of urates that were in the joint or tissues.
Kidneys also pull other toxins out of the blood.
Kidneys have more capacity than they need. I don't know the percentage, but you know many humans lose a kidney and live a fairly normal, long life with just the one kidney. I would suspect reptiles are the same.
As kidney failure happens--and the little tubules in the kidney become blocked or fail to do their job, there is still enough functioning kidney to do the job and the animal appears 100% healthy. Eventually, the amount of functioning kidney is not enough to support the animal and toxins slowly build up in the blood. That's when you start to see illness from kidney failure, long after the damage happened.
Damage to kidneys happen from a variety of reasons: acute or chronic dehydration, nephrotoxic drugs (drugs that are toxic to kidneys), starvation, low temperatures. There are lots of reasons why kidneys fail. Many keepers also combine two kidney damaging factors---dehydration with drugs that are damaging to kidneys.
My beautiful YingLong died from kidney damage caused by an episode of severe dehydration around import. He lived a healthy life producing lots of beautiful babies for me for almost two years and only showed decline in the last couple of months. He remained hydrated and his urates were snow white. He died in very good body condition. I and another much more experienced keeper--who saw YingLong--got it completely wrong. Based on how he was presenting and his body condition, we believed he had an intestinal blockage. Even very experienced keepers get things wrong.
Bottom line, it didn't matter to YingLong that we were wrong because there is not treatment for kidney failure and gout that would have cured him. You can prolong their life but you can't stop it. I personally would never treat known kidney failure other than supportive care and would definitely euthanize with known gout. Both kidney failure and gout are really awful for the animal with no good prognosis other than a small bit of time and a lot of suffering for the animal. I regret I didn't euthanize YingLong.
Please find peace with your chameleon's death. Perhaps you didn't give him enough water--and that could be because the air in his cage was too dry so he lost too much water from breathing to take up by drinking and eating. Or perhaps all this happened before you got him and he was a ticking time bomb--like my YingLong--just waiting for all that damage to catch up with him. Chronic dehydration is a major problem with captive chameleons which is why I recommend a good misting system for every chameleon from a PetSmart Veiled to something like my graciliors.
