Furcifer pardalis KLIMT

A very popular breeding line of the fabulous Panther Chameleon is typical by a very high share of dark blue color often combined with deep purple. It is considered very valuable due to its very unusual appearance and esthetic value.  

Animals like that have never been encountered in the wild.

To escape endless and to nothing leading discussion on the topic whether these blue breeding lines of Panther Chameleons can or cannot be called "Blue Ambanja" when it is known/probable they were crossbred at the beginning and blood of Ambilobe and possibly Nosy Be is present. And, not to attach the demeaning and pejorative term "Blurple" to them, I take the liberty to assign a term "KLIMT" to them, as it is normal for non-wild phenotypes of domesticated animals (horses, cattle, cats, dogs, chicken etc.), defining this way these breeding line as a "race" or "breed". They are named in honour of Gustav Klimt, whose heritage a choice of colours reminds on these chameleons.

Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist artist and a key figure in the Vienna Secession movement. He is renowned for his paintings, murals, sketches, and various art objects. Klimt predominantly focused on the female form, and his works are characterized by their candid eroticism. In addition to his figurative pieces, which encompass allegories and portraits, he also created landscapes. Among the Vienna Secession artists, Klimt was particularly influenced by Japanese art.

At the beginning of his career, he successfully painted architectural decorations in a traditional style. However, as he began to cultivate a more distinctive style, his work sparked controversy, notably when his paintings for the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna around 1900 were deemed pornographic. Following this backlash, he refrained from taking on any further public commissions and instead found renewed success during his "golden phase," characterized by the use of gold leaf in many of his artworks. 

The uniquenness, controversy and non/conformism edging with a revolt is IMHO a good paralell to the KLIMT Patnther Chameleon Breeding Line.

I often use the term blurple to refer to suspected crosses, but that term pre-dates my usage and has been used to describe some wild-type Ambanja phenotypes which have red and blue mixed bars which appear purple. I don't like this "purple" simplification because it is rare for there to be a continuous mix of red and blue resulting in true purple (a continuous blue sheen over a solid red base with reduced bars is much easier to achieve with a true blue Nosy Be body and a red body blue bar Ambilobe). The wild Ambanja phenotype is more often a pixelated red/blue that genetically can throw more red and less blue or more blue and less red in the next generation - similar to Ambilobe bars, but different shades of red and blue and higher degrees of pixelation in Ambanja.

Very early on, 1-2 generations from wild-caught parents, blurples were clearly not wild-type Ambanja. They have more blue than any Ambanja and more red in the body and face than any Ambanja. So please don't tell me they were selectively bred to look that way - it would take more than one or two generations of selective breeding to achieve that result. The best theory I have heard is that they are an F2 cross from a RBBB Ambilobe x Ambanja and a Nosy Be x Ambanja. That is where the red in the body comes from and the extra blue sheen over everything, which creates the appearance of "purple" where the red and blue overlap in an unnatural way. You'll notice that the shade of blue is enhanced by the Ambilobe blue bars but the baby blue body coloring is clearly Nosy Be. There's some Ambanja in there, but it is getting crowded out.

I have never seen a wild-type Ambanja with these traits, nor has anyone who has herped in Madagascar (check out our conversationwith Alex Laube, PhD, Lee/Amanda Ready and Thorsten Negro for more discussion on this topic). However, I have met multiple people who said they knowingly crossed RBBB Ambilobe, Nosy Be and Ambanja to produce this phenotype. One of those people sold locale cross females to "Ambanja" breeders in the United States who kept it hush hush more than 10 years ago. Those got mixed into the founding animals for this designer project. They have publicly acknowledged working together, but one party maintains that the designer cross projects downstream of this collaboration are pure Ambanja. Regardless of its true origin, the likelihood that a random mutation simultaneously occurred in a pure Ambanja line and these two known cross locale experiments is essentially zero. This is why I am nearly certain blurples are the result of a designer cross, not a pure Ambanja phenotype created in captivity.

Regardless of what I think about the origin story, breeders tend to sell pure locale Panther Chameleons and attempt to preserve wild phenotypes in their breeding programs. Blurples continue to be sold as pure Ambanja by breeders in the United States even though the phenotype can't be found in Ambanja, Madagascar. Perhaps, we should call it a designer chameleon, beautiful and extremely lucrative, given the demand for it, but reserve "Ambanja" for extant wild phenotypes.