Zeke’s new cage

A Family article with View Comments posted 27 April 2007.
Tags: chameleon

Yesterday we came home to find Zeke sprawled helplessly on the floor of the aquarium we keep his crickets (mmm… crickets) in. We don’t normally store that aquarium directly underneath the plant he lives in, but that day it was there. Being the klutz he is, he fell out of the plant 6 feet to the glass aquarium floor, where he was trapped for who-knows-how-many hours in a small box with a few hungry crickets and a lot of dead crickets. Poor guy! As my grandmother says, “Getting older is not for the faint of heart!”

Thus, with a gleeful “I get to play with POWER TOOLS!” gleam in my eye, Jennifer and I hung our new, big, nylon mesh Explorarium cage. This way he can only fall 2 or 3 feet to a soft, spongy nylon floor – much less likely to break fragile Zekes.

To make this happen, I took a angled aluminum bracket my dad scavenged for me and attached it to the ceiling with two heavy toggle bolts. Then I drilled a hole for the S-hook that holds the cage to the bracket. The plant inside the cage hangs from a plant hanger clipped to a small carabiner. The plant hanger just had hooks at the ends of the ropes, so I drilled holes and routed the ropes through the pot and clipped the hooks into yet more holes drilled in the edge of the saucer. The lamps are too big and hot to put inside the cage (and Zeke would climb on them) so instead they clip to the bracket. The S-hook doubles as a convenient way to route the power cords for the lights. Total cost of hardware (excluding the cage and lights) was about $10.

The finished product looks really good – it just needs some more foliage to give him some cover when he’s feeling shy. The Exo-terra cage was a bit pricey (we found the largest one for about $50 online) but is collapsable and comes with a carrying case and a removable plastic liner. With some modification to the bracket you can see at the top to support the extra weight and some strategically placed holes in the new pot we bought, it works pretty well.

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