Eyes Closed During Day/Weezing/Not Eating.....Help please

The Scrill

New Member
Hi everyone,

Current Problem: My chameleon has been closing her eyes during the day and when I hold her she does a weird coughing thing. Her mouth doesnt open when she does "cough" but I can tell its some respritory issue. I can really only tell when I hold her because she doesnt open her mouth so I dont know how much she does it. also she hasnt been eating lately. This has been going on for over a week now.. Since yesterday I've started taking her to the bathroom and doing 10 min hot water shower treatments and you can tell that she reacts positively to it. She starts out closing her eyes and doing the weird coughing thing, but once she settles her eyes start to open up and look alert and healthy. And she also starts opening her mouth and smacks her lips alittle as though shes getting more hydrated. I think the hot shower steam is helping, but I'm still worried. I was hoping that someone had a similar issue with their chameleon. I took out her dying/rotting umbrella plant the other day so I don't know if that got her sick or too much calcium. Her climate has stayed the same although it has been warmer and dryer where I'm at. I try and stay up on the spraying and just hooked up her mister today, so I'll have that up and going soon.

Couple questions.

Can chams get a cold/flu?

I kind of think that this is an over calcium problem, so if anybody thinks that these are symptoms of that please let me know.






Chameleon: ~9month old female panther chameleon (blue bar anilobe)
Have had her for over 5 months and this is the first timethis problem has arised

Handling: Handle her every other day or so for only around 10 mins. She is super tame though and will always just climb up on my hand when presented. Such a good girl.

Feeding: Gutloaded crickets and mealworms placed in cage late morning. Feed her as much as she wants to eat really. Gutload with carrots, collard greens, oranges, plums.

Supplements: Starting just using reptivite twice a month and just bought a thing of pure calcium that has no phosphorous or no D3. A couple weeks ago she seemed shakey so I thought it was onset of MBD so I started heavily dusting her crickets and worms everyday. Which I think might be why she is ill now.

Watering: I have always used a squirt bottle, but now I got new nozzles for my misting system and will set that up in the next couple days.

Fecal Description: Just had her at my parents house and on the ride home the other day (couple days ago) she had a very dry looking poop. The Urea part was the biggest aspect, but the feces part looked very crumbly and dry, which makes me think that she had too much calcium in her gut.

History: She had the calcium problem which seems to actually be fixed because of my dusting her crickets a lot. Shes not shakey anymore.

Cage Info:

Cage type: 36''x18''x18'' Sceen

Lighting: One 100w basking bulb, one Reptisun 5.0 UVB Tube light

Temperature: 75-95, night temps around mid 70's. Have the crappy temp gauge but seems accurate, for sure has a good range of temps in her cage.

Humidity: 40-80% recently, however last week I was real busy and it was hard to keep up on the humidity. Especially with how hots its been so got down to 20% some of the time.

Plants: This is also a suspicion of mine for why she is ill. I just took her umbrella plant out of her cage a couple days ago, because the leaves were rotting off and the plants health was not good and it seemed like it made my cham sick, even though she never ate it. Right now she has in her old healthy ficus.

Placement: In living room right next to window and sliding door. Mild traffic area, but she is really tame and isn't distracted by me and my girlfriend moseying around. Located on a coffee table too.

Location: Corvallis, OR. Pacific North West


Please give me your thoughts. Thanks,

Patrick
 
I'm not an expert but it sounds like she has a respiratory infection. You should probably take her to a vet ASAP
 
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