Any melleri that you take into your home will have many of the same needs in common, be it rescued, wild-caught, captive-hatched or -bred. The ultimate goal is to keep the new melleri comfortable so that it can heal or adjust at its own optimum pace. You want to avoid adding to the stress it is already experiencing. Any time melleri change address, they suffer from stress. A new home and/or its first experience in captivity can be extremely stressful, to the point of fatality. You as the keeper should make the transition as smooth as possible for your delicate pet.

Before your melleri arrives, get a confirmed delivery date and then start searching for a reptile vet near you. A great resource is http://www.arav.org/Directory.htm for nationwide herpetological and exotic specialist vets. Just because you read "exotic", do not assume the costs are prohibitive. Some of the best herp vets, nationwide, charge very competitive (start at $35 office visit) rates compared to regular small animal full-service practices. Remember that you are the client and they want YOUR business. Do not be afraid to ask the receptionist questions about the herp vet's experience with giant chameleons, particularly melleri. Ask if the vet can be reached at another time or if they will call you for a pre-visit phone consultation. This can be a great way to get referrals to specialists who do not advertise widely (usually so busy, they don't have to, and that's because they are skilled at their job). Ask if the clinic is a full-service hospital, including on-site pharmacy, basic lab (for fecals especially), X-rays, etc.

Doing your homework in selecting a vet is the difference between life and a lingering death. Why? Because your new melleri, regardless of where it comes from, needs a vet exam as soon as possible. Even previously well-kept melleri can have parasites that will explode in population once moving stress sets in. Knowledge is power, and you need all the help you can get to acclimate this species successfully. Some keepers only wait a couple days for the animal to rest after arrival. Others, based on judgment of the individual's emotional state, will allow 7 days before exposing the animal to a vet trip. See the article Your Melleri's First Vet Visit

The first thing to "get over" is a grumpy, sulking melleri. Regardless of how the animal was sold, with salesman's promises of "they make good companions" or whatever, you have an individual personality on your hands, and that individual will not show its true nature until it is acclimated. After being moved (from pet shop to your home, or from Africa to the pet shop), melleri feel threatened and can be aggressive. These animals have lost their established territories and wild diet, the only things in life that really matter to them, and are facing incarceration by quick-moving bipedal predators. It is like a living nightmare to a wild arboreal creature. Melleri can and will defend themselves with their claws and teeth. The last thing a melleri wants is to have to fall back on these defenses. You can avoid such an altercation by staying out of the chameleon's view for the first couple days you own it. Your cage or free-range should be already set up, complete with a dripper and bowl of prey, when you bring your melleri home. All you need to do is open the travel container and leave it inside. The melleri will be all too eager to help himself out of the container and perch by a heat source. It may help itself to the dripping water or the prey, but most likely only after you have left the room. Close the door to the melleri's room and prevent any humans or animals from entering. It may be best to do this in the late afternoon, as the melleri will roost when the lamp timers click off, and it will spend its earliest hours in your home sleeping peacefully instead of pawing its new walls.

Every effort you make to ease your melleri's acclimation will speed its recovery. When you come in to mist, refill the dripper, and replenish the food bowl, wear dull green clothing and move very slowly. Enter the room slowly, carrying all your supplies with you, and creep towards the cage. Avoid eye contact with the melleri. When a chameleon is about to capture prey, it rolls its eyes into binocular position. Our faces are already shaped in this fashion, so to a young melleri, which must avoid adults of its own species to avoid being eaten, we look as though we are about to eat them. This is only one theory as to why full-face eye contact causes new chameleons to hide or stress. Perform your tasks in silence. Chameleons "hear" by feeling vibrations through their perches and their air-filled bodies (like a drum). Melleri use infrasonic (as in elephants, okapi, and whales) communication, so the deep sounds of your vocalization, your heartbeat, even thunderstorms sound like loud, threatening gibberish to a melleri. You can reduce your "frightening" factor by being quiet.

Hydration without your presence can be achieved by use of a rain chamber or sanitized shower stall. If you use a shower in your home, make sure it is cleaned before and after use as a rain chamber. It is a better idea, if you have multiple showers in your home, to reserve one just for the melleri's use. Turn it on a very low sprinkle, just like a medium rainfall, and allow it to warm up. When the water is warm and the room is getting humid, test the water temp on your bare wrist, as one would test milk temperature for a bottle. The water should be mildly warm, not chilly and not hot. If your melleri will climb out of its cage onto a large sandblasted grapevine branch, you can slowly carry it to the shower and place on the shower stall floor. This is preferable to using a tree because some chameleons panic and will throw themselves from any height. The grapevines keep the animal off the cold floor, out of the run-off water, provide a large, comfortable grip, and are clean enough to drink from. The melleri may pass feces in the hydration session, and the grapevine keeps the animal up and away from any droppings. The duration of each session is roughly 45 minutes to several hours. Keep the bathroom darkened and close the doors to keep humidity inside. Check on the animal every few minutes, or sit quietly outside the shower for the duration. NEVER leave a melleri unattended in the shower- the water temperature may fluctuate dangerously, or the chameleon may hurt itself before settling in to drink. Chameleons with severe dehydration will need longer and perhaps twice daily trips to the rain chamber. Chameleons with only minor dehydration over their recent travels (such as from a reputable keeper to your home) will do well with one rain chamber session a day. Just because a melleri has stopped drinking in a session does not mean it done absorbing water into its skin and moist air in its lungs. When your melleri's parietal areas (the large parts of the skull that make up its casque) are bulging like pillows, you know it is well hydrated. If your melleri has sunken parietals, you need to administer electrolytes and continue rain chamber therapy.

Stress and Showers: Not all WC melleri take to showers readily. Some are terribly stressed by some element of the shower method, unknown to all but the animal. This may be caused by the water pressure, the vibrations (some sounds below the human range of hearing) of the water in the pipes in the wall, the water hitting the shower floor or the hollow fiberglass stall, vibrations from outdoors, etc. If your melleri reacts with "roaring" (forced barking or coughing sounds) and extreme Stress displays and does not calm in the darkened room, you need to find or create a different rain chamber. Darkness is key to using the rain chamber for chameleons.

Hydration without the aid of electrolytes in new melleri is only doing half of the job.  Electrolytes help the body use and absorb water at top capacity. A safe, over-the-counter electrolyte is Pedialyte for children. This is better than Gatorade, and even comes in a package convenient for chameleon keeper use. The Freezer Pops are sold in the baby food aisle at grocery stores, and each pop can be used individually, over several days. Freeze one pop horizontally to evenly distribute the contents, break into several small pieces, and defrost only one piece at a time. Defrosted Pedialyte doses are at top quality for only 48 hours (for unfrozen Pedialyte, the box says 48 hours after opening). With a small oral dose syringe (no needle), load the liquid Pedialyte and drip it onto the melleri's lips when it starts drinking water. Force-feeding Pedialyte is not recommended, unless your vet is performing this task. For melleri adults, dose 1 to 2 cc per hour, with 30 minutes between doses while the animal is considered at risk. If you overfill the melleri's stomach, it can aspirate (breathe the fluid) and die. As your melleri begins to show improvement, you can reduce to one dose a day. When your melleri is out of the first 90 days of close watch, you should have stopped the electrolytes, unless otherwise directed by a vet or if still on antibiotics.

Allow the new melleri to eat at liberty. This means, as much as it will eat, as often as it wants, by several methods. Allow it to hunt one bug at a time loose in its territory, and feed from a bowl of (pre-counted) prey, and feed from your hand. Free-rangers will hand-feed almost immediately, while caged melleri may take months to develop this trust. You will not have to worry about obesity the entire first year.

Create an outdoor enclosure for outdoor basking. Unfiltered (meaning not filtered through glass) natural sunlight is responsible for building immunity, psychological benefits, metabolizing D3 and calcium, and signaling reproductive hormones. Your melleri will acclimate best with natural sunlight basking at least 7 hours a week.

See the Outdoor Cage Dressing Tutorial for photos of actual cages used for acclimation.

After you have had your animal examined by a reputable herp vet, you have medical tools to help ease the situation. Use every day to observe and record your melleri's behavior, weekly weight, coloration, droppings, and prey consumption. If this sounds too much like a volunteer job at the zoo, it is exactly like that, and with a juvenile melleri, you have signed on for 12 years. If this sort of thing is your idea of bliss, you are going to love keeping chameleons. All things grow and change, and in time, your melleri's needs may change. Successful acclimation is the sign of a keeper that was willing to bend. Over the course of the first few months, your melleri may suddenly start to feel like itself. Good food, plenty of hydration, and general return of good health will cause your melleri to release its true self almost overnight. One day, it will seem happy with its enclosure, and the next morning, it may be dangling from the ceiling screen. Provide a larger enclosure or try alternative methods whenever faced with a change in your melleri's behavior. You and your melleri have to work out solutions for both of you.

Normally "content" melleri will suddenly show pacing, pawing, exploring, or ceiling hanging behavior for any of the following reasons:

1. Hormones kick in and males begin to search for females.
2. Growth spurts increase appetite and searching behavior significantly.
3. No nesting media is provided for a gravid female. Even maiden females will deposit eggs.
4. Something is suddenly wrong with your husbandry- a heater has turned up or broken, something new is in visual range, etc.

It is comparatively easy to fix husbandry problems, provide a nesting site, and even get a larger cage. You just keep fixing and adjusting until the animal shows normal behavior. But what about melleri that just don't seem at all happy with a cage? The free-range option is successful in homes without children or other pets. Several long-term keepers prefer this method because melleri tend to be tamer, more content, and do not paw or rub their noses. Some people do not believe any chameleons should be free-ranged because other pets may eat them or a careless person may step on a roving chameleon. (Remember: any melleri that leaves its territory is looking for something the keeper is not providing.) Read the following for more about free-ranging melleri:

"Free-range Setup"

http://www.chameleonnews.com/year2003/mar2003/free_range/free_range.html

If you have a male melleri, there is one more allowance you may have to make. You might need to start shopping for a female. If there is no female melleri in his territory, your male may go looking for one. Nothing will sway him from his search. Adolescent males will leave their cages the second the door is opened, march around the house, climb every stick of furniture, and even try to escape through window screens (they can claw and escape through fiberglass window screens, but will tear up their toes on aluminum screen). Males are programmed for this search, and cage walls or house walls will be marked from bloodied toes before they will rest. Your job as a keeper is to locate a female. This is no small task, as males and females appear quite similar and dealers have trouble telling them apart. You must begin the acclimation process all over again with a new female, and all the while continue managing your male's instinctive searching. For more information on maintaining and introducing a pair of melleri, read:

"Introducing and Cohabitating Melleri Pairs"

The good news is a peaceful cohabitation means the male never again leaves his territory. He has a reason to stay and defend his territory, for there is now a female in it.

After all your melleri's initial needs are met, expect it to take 30-90 days for true bright colors to show. This is an exciting time because as it starts to feel physically and emotionally good, the personality begins to shine. Content and self-confident melleri are real charmers and it's easy to see why so many people fall in love with them. These long-term captives develop attachments to certain people, recognize individual human faces, and take an interest in human activity in the home. Some melleri are like dogs in their friendly behavior. After it has shown steady good health in your care for a year, the acclimation is complete. Every time you move households, or if you sell your melleri to another person, the entire acclimation process must start again.

Here is another article about acclimating this species:
http://www.chameleonnews.com/year2002/nov2002/melleriacclimation/acclimation.html