What do Chameleons do?

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From the Book of General Ignorance - By John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

They don’t change colour to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total lie.

They change colour as a result of different emotional states. If they happen to match the background it’s entirely coincidental.

Chameleons change colour when frightened or picked up or when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature. A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells called chromataphores (from Greek chroma, colour, and pherein, to carry), each with different coloured pigments. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel.

It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies called Antigonus of Carystus in about 240 BC. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour–change to fear, and by the Renaissance, the ‘background’ theory had, once again, been almost entirely abandoned. But it’s come back with a vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know ’about chameleons.

Chameleons can remain completely motionless for several hours at a time. Because of this, and the fact that they eat very little, they were, for many centuries, believed to live on air. This, of course, isn’t true either.

The word chameleon is Greek for ‘ground-lion’. The smallest species is the Brookesia minima, which is 25 mm (1 inch) long; the largest is the Chaemeleo Parsonnii, which is more than 610 mm (2 feet) long. The common chameleon glories in the Latin name Chamaeleo Chameleon, which sounds like the opening to a song.

Chameleons can rotate and focus either eye independently to look in two completely different directions at once, but they are stone deaf.

The Bible forbids the eating of chameleons.