The number one driving factor for everything we do in the United States is money. This is a sad but undeniable truth. Breeding chameleons is a time consuming, expensive hobby. At the end of the day, if you can't sell your chameleons for a profit, it is very hard to maintain a long term project. For these new species, a huge majority of the market will be breeders and long time chameleon enthusiasts. The reason there has been very little success with campani, is because of the low prices and the ease of obtaining them. There are just not enough people who want them. Without a public market, it is very unlikely any species will be established. So breeders are not motivated to produce them. Seeing as how the import quotas for the new species are the same as campani or higher, I am pretty sure that their fate will be the same. Even for parsonii, when the price drops, less people will want them. There is just not enough demand for these species here.
You should see our reptile shows here. In Colorado, which is probably a little worse than most places, the shows consist mostly of genetically mutated ball pythons. The shows are pathetic. As a life long reptile lover, even I don't want to pay the $10 cover charge. Unfortunately, this is the road I see chameleons going. The future of chameleons in the US will most likely be mutated Panthers and Veileds. The public wants the pretty panthers, and the cheap veileds. That is what they will get.
I think this is pretty much true.
As I have read this thread the past few days, the questions that keep arising in my mind are:
what changes going forward would make things different?
for that matter-
Can we even identify the reasons for failure in establishing breeding groups over many generations for certain?
I'm not convinced we even know why we have failed.
What are the variables at play that might need changing to get new improved results?
This is why I'm not convinced- there are many variables.
I tend to lean towards nutritional deficiency that we are unaware of, many seem to have the opinion that the difficulty arises from not enough large breeding groups- and I certainly agree with that premise as well.
Also I can tell you after having sold many lizards of all sorts to individuals who purchase with the intention of breeding them some day, the huge majority loose interest by the time the lizards are mature and ready to breed- most enthusiastic individuals end up selling or trading their lizards away for the next interest that comes along. I was very surprised to see this occur with the melleri I produced and sold here on the forums a few years back as they were kind of pricey.
And then of course there is price- most of the chameleons we have "failed miserably at" nobody has really even made a serious effort at because the price point is too low. It discourages professional attempts by making them money loosing propositions on large scale (small scale you can still move some at a higher than imports price, the larger the scale the more the price has to compete with the imports to move so many). The price point of many of these species has encouraged impulse purchase by beginners. I just checked and can stock up on senegals this week for $12.50 each. You aren't going to get many people developing the herpetoculture for lizards that are so cheap. So- my point is price has also been a reason for failure.
Then I've got a friend who feels like maybe we are failing in incubation. Incubation could possibly effect the lizards and we wouldn't know it until their eggs (the eggs of the individuals who hatched from artificial incubation then matured and bred and produced their own eggs, once again incubated under artificial conditions and so on generation to generation) start failing in larger and larger numbers. I don't know how valid that point of view is, but the friend is a veterinarian who knows a lot about herps and has quite a bit of chameleon experience.
And then there is the idea that if we all just got more disciplined, kept better records and tried harder. I'm just not convinced the problem is that simple because of some of the comments from those who tried and failed. We've got a large scale pardalis breeder here on the forums with one of the largest operations for these lizards in the states convinced that pardalis can't keep going without fresh wild blood continually put into the captive gene pool... And then you've got Abate giving up and she took a presumably (from the high quality of the CIN articles) a very disciplined approach and still failed. To me, that doesn't make sense unless something like diet or incubation technique is messing with the DNA or causing some deficiency in some nutrient that is passed in decreasing amounts each generation from mother to egg...
The point is, I'm not sure failure is entirely from a lack of trying. I sure intend to give things a go as if that is the problem and hope that is the case though. Don't get me wrong. My interest is in developing self sustaining lizard populations, but these guys failures has me feeling a bit nervous about my prospects with chameleons over the long term...
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Sort of shifting vantage points, and probably politically incorrect in some ways, but-
What are the reasons for wanting change in the success rate? Is it protection of these species in the wild? Is it prevention of their loss to future generations of terrarium lovers? Is it prevention of suffering from wild collected individuals? Is it to advance the herpetoculture of these species resulting in the usual selective breeding for development of special traits such as abnormal eye popping coloration or man made color morphs, etc?
And then once we have the answers to the above questions, my next question is- are we even going about this in the most effective way then?
For example- if conservation is the goal, wouldn't it make the most sense to continue importation on a limited licensed scale with some sort of taxation at the point of collection with the funds used to manage habitat and protect habitat from development? Maybe proper management at the point of collection, with more humane collecting and holding and transport methods would make more sense to focus on from a conservation point of view? If we could produce a million parsons here in America, I'm not convinced it would do as much for conservation as collecting a managed sustained harvest number in their native land, taxing the collection heavily, and using the money to manage and protect habitat. Part of that management of course would be keeping tabs on how many are out there and how many can be removed and under what age to keep the wild population healthy.
If the goal is simply to benefit the hobby and ensure these species aren't lost to it, and to promote humane conditions for the animals, maybe the most sense would be to set up large scale breeding operations at point of origin (madagascar). This has been done successfully for other species that were struggling at some point and ensured the survival of the species (on the farms at least (bleh!) and their availability often for multiple uses such as pets, food, leather- examples that pop to the front of my mind include green iguanas, american alligators, asian water monitors, chrondopythons. I'm not convinced that these are the most humane conditions, but there again chameleons are a bit different in their response to crowding and such, and humane conditions could be corrected with legalities and licensing.
I don't know- just some random thoughts this morning.
No answers, just questions and random thoughts...
What I really wish is that someone would go do a bunch of lab type work on wild chameleons so we really know what they are made of and have that to compare with captive animals when it comes to blood work, etc, so we could do some more serious tweaking of diet and supplementation...
