smooth muscle contraction and hydration of visceral fluid in K. multituberculata

[EmanSami]

Ok, I admit it. I made the thread title scientifically fancy purely for kicks haha.

Seriously though...this is what I noticed and I think it is very amazing...

My Kinyongia was dehydrated some time ago (my fault, yikes). His eyes were sunken in a bit of course. As soon as I misted him and he drank the water, he did the craziest thing I have ever seen him do, and I wonder if this is unique to this species, their genera, or perhaps other chams and animals can do this.
anyway

As soon as he drank, it seems as though he used muscles surrounding his eyeballs to squeeze one part of each eyeball to make it look disproportional(imagine squeezing part of a full water balloon such that one part gets smaller and the rest expands from the forced water. Amazingly, he then made a rolling muscle motion which expanded and contracted the muscles in a circular motion around the eye so that he could do this to all parts of the eye equally. (imagine taking that same water balloon and palming it, but then shifting the weight of your hand back and forth so water circulates around the entire balloon, squeezing and expanding the balloon in different places as you do this).

Almost instantly, his eyes became hydrated and puffed back out. I am guessing that this mechanism operates by way of smooth muscle contractions, with the purpose of creating higher osmotic pressure to instantly pump water into the visceral fluid of the eye.

I think this is an amazing evolutionary trick that these guys use. I definitely have not seen my veiled do this, which seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't a cham in hotter climates benefit more from this, as opposed to a rainforest dwelling creature that has less trouble finding water to drink in general?

What also doesn't seem to make sense is that my veiled gets dehydrated more easily than my Kinyongia, and is a LOT less likely to drink available water as soon as he is misted. My veiled has sunken eyes still and I am giving him damn good MistKing sessions, only to see him lick a couple drops ONCE ever since I hooked up the MistKing.

Anyway, has anybody seen their cham literally ROLL THEIR EYES like this?? Isn't that f*kng cool??

 

[stevenelvin]

Thats insane! I have never seen my k. multi do anything like that.

 

[Chris Anderson]

What you are describing is simply the way chameleons clean their eyes. I'm surprised you've not seen it in your veiled, actually. Often it is accompanied by rubbing their eye turret against the branch they are on.

Do you have any reason so suspect smooth muscle causing this contraction? Typically smooth muscle contraction is involuntary and this eye cleaning behavior is under voluntary control, indicating that it is striated muscle. Also, as far as I know, the sunken eye turrets caused by dehydration is not caused by a decrease in the aqueous humor or vitreous humor of the eye. On a side note, many chameleon species (particularly Calumma sp.) can voluntarily retract their eye turrets into their skull while sleeping or while in stressful situations, which tends to look like dehydration even though it isn't.

Chris