Jacksonii or Mt. Meru

[sanfran1932]

Wondering if someone can help identify my new female Jackson’s as a Jacksonii or Mt. Meru. She was sold as a Jacksonii, but her small size (3.5 inches), single rostral horn, and coloration make me curious.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[Beman]

@JacksJill can you ID?

 

[kinyonga]

This might help…pay attention to the spines on the crests on their backs and the colour of the different areas of the heads…
http://www.chameleonnews.com/10JulManchen.html

 

[JacksJill]

She's a jacksonii jacksonii. It would be amazing to see a Mt Meru in the US.

I have had females her size.

 

[bobcochran]

Wondering if someone can help identify my new female Jackson’s as a Jacksonii or Mt. Meru. She was sold as a Jacksonii, but her small size (3.5 inches), single rostral horn, and coloration make me curious.

Any help is appreciated!

I haven’t seen any Mt. Meru in this country for many years.

 

[DeremensisBlue]

Wondering if someone can help identify my new female Jackson’s as a Jacksonii or Mt. Meru. She was sold as a Jacksonii, but her small size (3.5 inches), single rostral horn, and coloration make me curious.

Any help is appreciated!

There is almost no way for there to be a mix-up between these subspecies in exportation. Not because they don't look similar - they can! But, because Mt. Meru Jackson's come from a high mountain top in Tanzania that is a great effort to go to and Tanzania has been closed to exports for nine years.
The Machakos Hills population is a very easy to reach location in Kenya and is legal to export from Kenya.
So these are not going to be accidentally mixed up in an exporter's facility.
If someone did make a trek to Mt. Meru to illegally gather chameleons and then smuggle them into Kenya so they could be shipped as different species they would do so as a specially planned operation to a specific importer who would already have a customer to quietly sell to. They would not be mixed in with the Machakos Hills jackson's and sold as a filler to meet the number of heads ordered. If someone needed filler chameleons for an order and didn't care about accuracy, they would just pick off some jackson's chameleons from the hotel grounds in Nairobi and stop for pizza on the way back home.
We occasionally get Jackson's in that are labelled Mt. Merus. These have always turned out to be jacksonii jacksonii. If the Mt. Merus and the Machakos Hills were geographically right next to active trapping grounds then a mix-up could happen. We go through this with the Madagascar shipments of Calumma brevicorne-crypticum-malthe and Calumma linotum-tjiasmantoi-nasutum-boettgeri and Brookesia supercilliaris-therezieni so mix-ups at the exporters is a definite dynamic there! But, the Mt.Meru mix-up would require enormous effort and legal danger. That is just not an accident that has a reasonable chance of happening.