23 March 2010

Dear webmaster,

One of your topics for a middle school science fair is to manipulate a chameleon to change color. I am a chameleon owner and you cannot manipulate it to change color. They do not change color drastically as many people think. In order for it to change color you have to stress them out. They can die from being too stressed out. So I suggest you take that off, because people need to stop thinking that a chameleon would change color by simple manipulation – changing background color, light color, etc.

Dear reader,

I really appreciate your deep concern for animal safety and wellbeing.

However, many scientific experiments, if not most of them, pose some danger to something or somebody.

Our mission, in this respect, is not to give up but to experiment correctly in order to reduce risk as much as possible. To achieve this, we have to educate and raise awareness of experiment safety procedures including animal safety.

To remove this topic from my page is useless since the fact that chameleons could be “forced” to change color mainly by stress is mentioned all over the web. And take in account that in the external link suggested on my page the student that did this experiment didn’t try to stress the chameleon.

In your case, the best course is to take profit of the suggested science fair project (chameleon manipulation to change color) in order to educate for chameleon safety regarding this experiment in particular and to introduce to the general public this issue of chameleon color change and the fact that stress can endanger a chameleon and that this practice should be avoided altogether.

I invite you and other cham owners to write an article about the topic and I’ll willingly post it on my site with due credit.