Veiled chameleon

Description:

The male veiled chameleon is primarily green in color and tends to be marked with stripes and spots of yellow, brown, and blue. Depending on the animal's emotional state, this green will range from a bright lime green to a red olive drab. When veiled chameleons are stressed, they often display strong coloration, including bright yellow and sometimes even black. Surroundings only partly contribute to a chameleon's "decision" to change color. Nonbreeding females and juvenile chameleons are generally a uniform green color with some white markings. Breeding and gravid females are a very dark green with blue and yellow spots. The prominence of these markings is dependent on several factors, including health, mood, and temperature of the lizard.

Habitat:

The species inhabits a vast and climatically heterogeneous distribution area in the south of the Arabian peninsula. In this have different color and clearly from each other developed also in the size different local forms, living in the north, the southern forms surpass in size and color. Their systematic position remains to be addressed. They colonize in some cases quite different habitats. One finds the animals in both the dry sparsely vegetated plains of Yemen and Saudi Arabia as well as in the vegetation-rich mountain slopes South Yemen. Even in tropical to subtropical climate of Saudi Arabia belonging Asir province, with 2,000 millimeters of annual precipitation, the wettest and vegetation richest area of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen there are chameleons, represented here in the subspecies Chamaeleo calyptratus calcalifer.

Notes:

Pictures are taken at TerraZoo, Rheinberg, Germany. This small Zoo is specialized in reptiles.