Tamatave Chameleons for sale in the UK

Tamatave is a panther chameleon locale from the port city of Toamasina, formerly Tamatave, on Madagascar's east coast. The name stands for a population, not a gene, and this is the red locale: keepers buy the males for crimson colour broken with white.

Appearance

A displaying male is bright red, running to intense crimson, with white markings across the head, flanks and limbs. At rest the base can sit green and colour up into red, with the white showing as speckling.

The neighbouring east coast populations look nothing like him. North at Mahavelona the animals are white with faint grey, on Nosy Boraha offshore they are white with red, and inland at Vavatenina they are almost entirely white. The Tamatave name promises a red animal. Females of every locale look alike, and nothing on a female marks her out as Tamatave.

Genetics

No inheritance mode applies to a locale, so there is no het and no super form. These populations do not normally mix in the wild, but in captivity every locale breeds freely with every other, and a crossed animal can closely resemble a pure one. Since no feature assigns a female to a locale, a Tamatave's ancestry rests on the breeder's records. Ask which line an animal comes from.