Endangered
Two-banded chameleon
Furcifer balteatus
Two-banded chameleon, also known as the two-banded chameleon or the rainforest chameleon, is a chameleon that is endemic to Madagascar.
Appearance
Even though basically green, Two-banded chameleon is variable in colour and is well camouflaged in its arboreal surroundings. It often has darker green diagonal stripes with paler bands between and usually has a characteristic buff-coloured diagonal streak.
The body length can be as much as 24 cm (9 in) and the tail as least as long again. The males have a pair of horny projections 1.5 cm (0.6 in) long on their heads.
It was described by André Marie Constant Duméril and Gabriel Bibron in 1851.
Range and habitat
Two-banded chameleon is endemic to southeast Madagascar. It can be found in Ranomafana where the average temperature is between 14 and 20 degrees Celsius (57 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and the rainfall is roughly 4,000 millimetres (160 inches) per annum. It has been found over an estimated area of 1,971 square kilometres (761 square miles) but has a "patchy distribution" and is believed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to be decreasing in population.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
A chameleon rocks, aims, and shoots the tongue. Many dwarf species live in low vegetation or leaf litter, not only in high canopy.
In crisis
Two-banded chameleon is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Two-banded chameleon, Wikidata item Q2087128. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
