Chameleons do not change color to match their surroundings.
That sentence is the whole reason this note exists. Nearly every adult believes the opposite. It is in cartoons, it is in the way people use the word chameleon about a person who fits in anywhere, and it is wrong in a specific and interesting way. Martin Jenkins is a conservation biologist. His book is short, funny, aimed squarely at a five-year-old, and built around the animal as it actually is rather than the animal in the idiom.
It is a Read and Wonder title, so a story line and a factual line run together on the page, and the whole thing takes about eight minutes out loud.
The science it actually teaches
If not camouflage, then what.
Two things mainly, and neither one is hiding. The first is temperature. A chameleon is a lizard, it cannot make its own heat, and its color changes how much of the sun's warmth its skin takes in. A cold chameleon in the morning goes dark, because dark absorbs. The same animal, too hot in the afternoon, goes pale, because pale reflects. That is not decoration. It is a thermostat with no moving parts, worn on the outside.
The second is talking. Color on a chameleon is a signal aimed at other chameleons. A male warning off another male. A male courting. A female saying she is not interested, or that she is already carrying eggs. A loser in a fight going drab and dark to say it is over. The display is loud on purpose, and being seen is the entire point of it. That is the exact opposite of camouflage, which is what makes the myth so irritating once you can see it.
Chameleons do hide, and they are good at it, but they hide with shape and stillness. The body is flattened like a leaf. The everyday coloring already sits in the greens and browns of the plant it lives in. The walk is a slow rock forward and back that reads to a watching bird as a leaf in a light wind. That is the camouflage. The color change is a separate system that happens to use the same skin.
While you are correcting one thing, correct two. Most people pushed on how the color change works will say pigment, like ink spreading through the skin. Pigment is part of it. But research in the last decade or so found that the bright colors come from a layer of cells holding a lattice of tiny crystals, and the animal changes the spacing of that lattice. Change the spacing and you change which wavelengths of light bounce back at you. It is closer to what makes a soap bubble shimmer than to what makes paint blue. Your child will not get that out of this book, because it is newer than this book is. They will get it from you, standing on the page where the colors change. A nine-year-old keeps that one for good.
Two more the book hands you outright. The eyes work independently, each one riding its own turret inside a fused eyelid with nothing but a pinhole for the pupil, so the animal watches two directions at once and gives up almost nothing. Then, when something worth eating turns up, both eyes swing forward and lock on the same point, because you cannot judge distance with one eye and the tongue only gets one attempt.
Then the tongue. It is longer than the animal's own body and it does not work the way a muscle pulling works. Elastic tissue behind it is loaded up like a drawn bow and released, which is how it leaves faster than any muscle could pull it, and the tip arrives wet and gripping rather than sticky the way tape is sticky. If your child takes one mechanical fact out of this book, take that one, because it explains the speed instead of just being amazed at it.
The feet are worth ten more seconds. The toes are fused into two opposed bundles, so each foot closes on a branch like a pair of tongs, and the tail wraps around as a fifth limb.
On depth: this is a picture book and the factual line runs a sentence at a time. It is right, which is the entire argument for it. Deep it is not. No diagram of the eye, no cross-section of the tongue. What you are buying is a five-year-old who never acquires the wrong idea in the first place, which is worth more than it sounds, because the wrong idea is what everybody else is going to hand them.
The child it lands with
Do you have the child who corrects people? The one who has already informed a grandparent that a tomato is a fruit, and enjoyed it enormously? This is ammunition, and it is accurate ammunition, which is the part that matters.
Past that, the reptile child, the one standing at the lizard tank in every shop and every museum until somebody physically moves them. And, being honest about it, the adult holding the book, who is the most likely person in the room to learn something.
One place to stop and talk
You are probably the one about to be corrected here, and that is the best use of this book.
Before you open it, say what you think you know. Chameleons change color to blend in. Say it out loud, in front of your child, as your answer. Then read the book and let the book contradict you.
That is a small piece of theater and it does two jobs at once. Your child gets the fact, which they were going to get anyway. Your child also gets to watch a grown-up be plainly wrong about something ordinary, notice it, and change their mind on the spot without any fuss or any face-saving. The second thing is most of what science actually is, and it is close to impossible to teach by describing it.
Then leave a question on the table that you cannot answer either. If color is for talking, who is it being said to, and what happens to a chameleon that lives on its own.
What to know going in
Nothing in this book is frightening, and nothing dies on the page except insects, which are caught and eaten in the ordinary way an animal book shows it. The caution here is a different shape.
First, the book is a product of the 1990s and one piece of it has aged. Why the animal changes color, which is the whole point of this note, has held up fine. How the skin does it has moved on considerably. If your child comes away with pigment as the mechanism and stops there, they are carrying a twentieth-century answer to a question that got a better one.
Second, and this is the real one. A child who reads this is going to want a chameleon. Chameleons are among the hardest reptiles to keep alive in a house. They need particular light, particular humidity and a supply of live insects, they hide illness until it is well advanced, and the pet trade has taken real numbers out of wild populations. Have that conversation before you open the book, not three weeks into the campaign.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 in paperback at Chameleons Are Cool. Buy it even if nobody in your house cares about lizards. Nine dollars to stop a false fact from being installed in a five-year-old, one that would otherwise take twenty years and an argument to get back out, is the best value on the Stealth Science shelf. And if you already own a stack of reptile books, this one still earns its place, because the stack almost certainly contains the myth.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Surprising Sharks: What the Word Shark Actually Covers
Surprising Sharks: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Animal Teeth: Which What If You Had Book to Buy First
What If You Had Animal Teeth? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
