Chameleon Breeder Podcast With Bill Strand

You can keep and breed roaches in a bioactive environment with great success! They are living creatures just like our chameleons and benefit from natural surroundings. Summer Winston from The Shap comes on and shares her experience breeding roaches in a bioactive environment.

The Brookesia Stump-tailed chameleons are some of the most cryptic and fascinating of chameleons! Michael Nash joins me to discuss what he has learned by breeding a number of species.

Is misting dangerous? Should chameleons drink from water cups instead? There are may ideas bouncing around the internet. Some are good and some not so good. But it can be hard to tell the difference. Today I go over a way that we can evaluate ideas and decide to embrace them or move on.

Learn how to keep plants alive! We chameleon people love our plants, but are not always the most successful with them! Today I bring on Elizabeth Vasquez from Propagated Perfection, a small business that specializes in propagating house plants or finding that perfect specimen plant for your chameleon cage!

My trip to Madagascar helped me better understand chameleon husbandry. There is something about being there and feeling the environment that cannot be substituted by just looking at numbers. This podcast and post is about what I learned by going to Madagascar, seeing chameleons in their natural habitat, and pondering how what I observed could affect how i kept chameleons. I invite you to come along with this very special episode. This episode was written from my bungalow in Andasibe, Madagascar while I watched a cyclone drop its rain on the forest.

This is an episode for educators, admins, breeders, vet offices, and influencers that would like to use the new 2022 Yellow-Crested Jackson's Chameleon Care Guide in their outreach. There is a story behind every number and graphic on this care guide and, in this episode, I go over some of the background and even controversy. To effectively serve the newcomers to the community it is good to understand why the parameters were selected and how to effectively adjust the concepts to fit unique situations.

I talk about what newcomers face when coming into the community and then review the dangers breeders face in today's social media world. The major platforms are hostile towards breeders and I discuss the options of how you can protect your business if your account is removed unexpectedly.

Dr. Rachel (IG/TT: @exotic.pet.vet)comes on and discsses her paper which shows the parasites present in outwardly healthy reptiles at public reptile shows in Texas. We discuss her findings and what they mean for our herpetoculture.

I am joined by Jonathan Hill of iPardalis and we are talking about setting up baby chameleons in small cages. You can use the same environmental conditions as adults, but you have to execute it much differently!

I am joined by Cohost Mike Tytula and we talk about laying bins and my approach to a quarantine cage. But, the highlight of the show is that I promised Mike that I would introduce him to a very cool new species of chameleon that might be available as captive hatched in the next few years! For that we bring on breeder Tim Marks from Leap Habitats who is pioneering the establishment of the Canopy Chameleon (Furcifer willsii) in captivity. This is an amazing chameleon and I think I did good fulfilling my promise!

Today I talk about breeding panther chameleons. It isn’t that hard to get babies, but it is not easy to raise them properly. And selling them is a task all to itself! Hang tight because I am going to go over an overview of the entire process!

The world of parasites is complex and presents us reptile keepers with much to consider! Join me for a thought provoking discussion about parasites and reptile husbandry. 

We want to give our chameleons the best life possible and I go over five simple ways you can make a huge difference with you chameleon!

Isopods are one of the most common invertebrates used as clean-up crew in a bioactive environment. Today I talk with Rus Wilson from Aquarimax and he introduces us to this new world!

Reptile photographer Ferdy Timmerman joins us to talk about his approch to bioactive naturalistic environments.

Setting up a bio-active environment is just the first step. Now you have to maintain it! Today I talk with John Courteney-Smith MSRB about the ways that a bio-active environment could get in trouble and how to prevent that!

Walter Tanpondjou returns to the podcast after defending his PhD thesis and shares the studies he is involved in.

It is common to hear people in the chameleon community say that chameleons need to be in screen cages. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case, but there is no black and white in chameleon keeping and the answer becomes clear once we learn the nuances. So, today, we are going to learn about screen cages.

Today we talk about keeping baby and smaller chameleon species outdoors. I lay out the benefits, the challenges, and some techniques. 

Bioactive envronments have given us success with the rarer species and is a next step for the dedicated chameleon herpetoculturist.