@DeremensisBlue said..."Yes, this is the current thought and this will play out to lower basking temperatures in the future being standard".... Hopefully there will be a standard basking temperature in the future.
You said..."The challenge is communicating this in a way that does not get people in trouble. Lower basking temperature also slows their growth and if someone does it wrong they will have a stunted female. So I have to balance out how I communicate this"...this is exactly the issue I've been having for years. If I say at a certain age to start controlling the temperture the female may not be at her full adult size...if I say at a certain weight to start, she may not be sexually mature yet.
You said.... "When I make a care sheet I have to consider that I do not know the person that will read it. I am not personally presenting it to them. So I need to be careful to have a conservative element to it. I learned a valuable lesson introducing the naturalistic hydration approach and all the ways that was executed incorrectly in ways I did not imagine"...this is exactly the problem...how the person reads it.
You said..."I am much more aggressive in my push for lower temperatures for female veiled chameleons than I am for pardalis because we have veiled females dying within the first year due to dystocia"...IMHO pardalis are not as easy to slow down or stop for some reason but less likely to die in the same way veileds do/can.
You said..."But I have to totally revamp how I teach judging the point where you back off on feeding. I have already had people stop feeding ad libitum too early using a time based measure. So I would welcome hearing how you handled tapering down the food amount as your Veileds were growing up. I need to get another clutch to experiment with to try another round of “recipes”.
So far the best I can work out is to have people start cutting them back on the diet and temperature earlier than what would be the perfect time to do it and let that last bit of froth to adulthood progress slower and hope that ok."...it's why I waver sometimes when I'm trying to explain the timing to prevent that first clutch from being large or preventing follicular stasis. It's hard to explain so that people understand it and get it right. I keep trying to figure out how to explain it so that people stop feeding them too much in time to prevent follicular stasis when you can't tell soon enough ahead of time when the "big girl colors" are going to come in ...by which time the diet should be have been started already.
