Why I like Graciliors Best...

jajeanpierre

Chameleon Enthusiast
Graciliors (Trioceros quadricornis gracilior) are "like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get." (Forest Gump)

Yesterday I had lunch with @jpowell86. He lives about six hours away from me so we often meet for lunch half way. We sometimes bring animals for the other to see--sort of a show and tell of what we have.

Joel brings animals just to show me something I've never seen. Like the magnificent Calumma oshaunessyi male he brought yesterday. I am in love!

Joel has been to my house many times and is often with me when I bought new imports so he knows what I started with. Sometimes he just wants to just see how they are doing. Or, like the Calumma malthe Lichen, he just wants to feast his eye on something I have that he loves. On my end, I want opinions on my animals. I once brought a little baby that had died the day before and he did a necropsy on it in the parking lot. We are an odd pair!

Joel asked to see a yellow cheeked male gracilior that is captive hatched and a clutch mate to his own gracilior. I hatched out this male. He's always been so yellow--even as a little baby--the name "Goldilocks" popped into my head one day I was photographing him and it stuck. Goldilocks has never ever not once never shown a single blue scale. Nowhere. Never.

Yesterday when I pulled him out of the traveling box he was blue. Joel and I both looked at him in disbelief and couldn't believe it was Goldilocks. We checked him over--nope, this is definitely a captive hatched. I had only brought two adult male graciliors and the second was an orange-cheeked wild caught boy with a mess of an infection along the spines of his sail fin that the vet and I are not able to cure so there was no mixing those two up. Joel questioned if I had opened the wrong cage. Nope. The only other adult captive bred gracilior I have is in the cage beside Goldilocks and this was definitely not him as their horns are different. Nope, this looked like Goldilock's horns but was NOT Goldilock's color at all.

I have no idea where that blue came from. I've never seen it on him before. When I got home, I took some pictures of him right out of the shipping box. He was dark from the stress and the sun was low in the sky, so the colors aren't as blue as they really were.

Just for fun, I've put pictures of him yesterday side by side with pictures of him as I see him every single day.

I love that graciliors are always changing. Goldilocks was hatched in August of 2015, so a fully mature male.

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I'm still blown away by this, Janet. I have seen Goldilocks many times and he is the same brilliant yellow as Cato. Now it makes me wonder if Cato has the blue in him as well.

I had a good time yesterday as always. I still think people believe we are drug dealers always meeting up in the same spot with trunks open. I forgot about that necropsy I did in the parking lot. Glad no one saw that. HAHA!
 
I'm still blown away by this, Janet. I have seen Goldilocks many times and he is the same brilliant yellow as Cato. Now it makes me wonder if Cato has the blue in him as well.

I had a good time yesterday as always. I still think people believe we are drug dealers always meeting up in the same spot with trunks open. I forgot about that necropsy I did in the parking lot. Glad no one saw that. HAHA!

No one would have confused your magnificent C. oshaunessyi for drugs yesterday!
 
@jajeanpierre is he still showing the blue? or back to yellow? They truly are amazing chams ^^

@Andee I took this picture this morning. It's out of focus, but you can see the blues and greens around the edges of his casque. I wonder if he found his blue colors yesterday. I was shocked to see blue eye sparkles on his turrets yesterday. You should have seen Joel and I looking at him trying to figure out who he was--Joel insisting it couldn't be Goldilocks, me agreeing based on what I saw in front of me but I remember which cage he came out of.... It was really funny.
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