Need a little bit of help!

KAM3LiiON

New Member
Ok so moderator Trace had a wicked sweet blog about crested chams and I own one about 6 months old! he was born in captivity so I dont know if the seasonal schedule he describes would be appropriate for my little guy! he is supposed to be on his dry period and I was stickin to it but then I saw him sleeping during the day which scared the crap out of me!! 8( so I broke down and gave him humidity again!! and he seems to be feeling good! so if he is at this age should I enforce the seasons? because it seems to me he is not adapted to it like a wild one be! he seems to be happier with the humidity! and im only posting because I have not heard back from Trace in a day or 2 so ide like some opinion!!
 
should I enforce the seasons? because it seems to me he is not adapted to it like a wild one be! he seems to be happier with the humidity!

Seems to me he's giving you the right answer. However, as we don't know the details about where you live, what your house is like, or the actual humidity levels you were trying to match, consider that the typical human house is going to be drier than the wild habitat where cresteds originate. If most of us tried to keep our houses at the humidity level of tropical forests we'd be miserable and everything would mold. I learned that the hard way when I set up a free range room for my melleri in Colorado...the closed closet in that room sprouted some pretty darn SCARY stuff after a few months! A captive cham cage setup isn't going to be much like a living forest at all. The forest will retain a lot more moisture with stable air humidity simply because it is huge and almost everything in it absorbs, retains, and releases water over and over again. All those plants release water vapor during transpiration even when it hasn't rained.

What we tend to think of as a tropical "dry season" is more of a lack of rainfall, not very low humidity at least in the understory where the chams would be living. You'd have to look at very specific climate data to find out how little or how much the relative humidity of a wild habitat changes from season to season. I bet it isn't very much.

Now a cham cage in a house is going to fluctuate a lot more and dry out a lot faster. The cage isn't going to contain those masses of living plants...there will be a few smaller ones in pots instead of growing in a huge sponge of living soil. So we have to keep replacing moisture every day. If you are keeping your cham indoors all the time you will probably not want to force as much of a distinct "dry season". You can still create seasons with your day length and temperature cycle, but humidity probably needs to be more stable...not constantly really high, but varying throughout the day.

Just my opinion....
 
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