i've been wondering about this for some time. when it comes to keeping reptiles, what role or influence does all of these man-made varieties have on the hobby? i mean when does it go from keeping reptiles for what they are, to just collecting the prettiest or latest strain of creature? i admit that many color morphs are beautiful and i'm not trying to start any arguements, but when does studying the natural history and ecology of an animal become basicly collecting somethings for the sake of collecting? i started with reptiles way back in the very early '70's, essentially there were no morphs to speak of. studying reptiles and amphibians was akin to say studying wildlife but we were able to maintain them in captivity to our delight. our captives were merely examples of the ones that lived in the wild. then something happened. captive breeding began to produce oddities occasionally. these were bred to isolate those traits and produce even more strains. money i know was involved and that drove the practice.

i know that when i was young, by learning about the animals natural habits and habitat, you were able to figure out how to maintain them properly in captivity. now it seems, that many(not all) are just wanting to get a certain pretty animal and only want to know how to take care of it by reading a caresheet and maybe asking a few basic questions of a fellow keeper. i think caresheets are great but if one relies on a basic caresheet for all there is to know about their creatures, then isn't it kind of like just following a recipe? now there is nothing evil or improper about this because nearly always the animal is well taken care of, but by doing this does anyone think that those keepers are missing out on a major aspect of reptile keeping? i mean just knowing how to maintain something in captivity doesn't enrich your understanding of the actual species and how they fit into the natural world.

i'm not having a go at anyone or critizing anyone. i'm just trying to see where everyone's head is. in my early days it was called "herpetology" but now it seems to be "reptile keeping/collecting" sometimes now it seems that knowing how to keep a snake alive in a vivarium is secondary to knowing what it is and where it naturally lives. sometimes, and i apoligize for this, it appears to me that many good people have a stamp collecting mentality to keeping herps. is there a divergence between herpers and pet keepers?

i just thought that this would be a good subject for discission. it's not about right or wrong. it's just me trying to understand these things better.


if anyone wants to weigh in on this it would be nice. but please no defensiveness. just food for thought here. if this is a stupid or offensive thread, just ignore it.

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You are so right. Now days its all about what people keep and breed. I was talking to a friend about this and he said the same thing. You could be the most knowledgable person out there conserning biology etc but if you don't keep or collect anything no one seems to care.

I think inbreeding to prove out a gene or introduce a new colour to the hobby is immoral but tbh i dont object enough not to keep the nice morphs - Hipocracy i know

Its a big shame herpetology has been long lost to reptile keeping and collecting though, people have a big stigma attatched to wild caught animals. If there's a large population of CB stock then fair enough but we have a lot to learn from WC animals and we could introduce a lot of new and interesting species to the hobby but people would rather have a royal in a fancy colour than have a new species introduced to the hobby and learn about a new species - big big shame but it does the hobby no harm imo.

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I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah.....I'll do what I want but irresponsibly!!!

My partner and I are almost exactly opposed on this issue.

I love morphs, because I find genetic diversity and the inheritability of traits fascinating.
He likes normals, because he likes them for what they USUALLY look like in the wild.

If it weren't for blizzard leopard geckos, I wouldn't have leos - it was that bright white animal with blue eyeshadow that made me think "Wow, I want one of those!" The fact that I now own quite a few leos, and only three of them are blizzard-based... well, I like them for the animals they are, but I wanted one because I loved how the visual morph looked.

It becomes collecting for the sake of collecting when you don't keep them as individual animals, but as parts of a collection and the collection itself is worth more to you than the sum of the individual animals that make it. That's whether you're trying to get or create all the possible combinations of Lavender in corn snakes... or all the possible wild type localities of Greyband Kingsnakes.

Which is one reason every single one of my reptiles has a name - because they are individuals, not parts of a collection.

However, that's not actually how it happened.

The original base morphs - in MOST cases - came from wild caught animals.

For example, this year Crystal Palace Reptiles had a wild-caught Albino-type royal python in stock. Not captive bred, not captive farmed. It was a wild animal that was albino.

Captive breeding doesn't MAKE the original genetics happen - it just makes it more likely to happen AGAIN.

Not everyone who buys a dog cares about the social structure of wolf packs (though it would be in their best interests if they did).
Not everyone who wants a pet rabbit is interested in how rabbits build warrens.

And not every person who keeps a reptile is interested in anything more than having a reptile as a pet.

I know I'm not THAT interested in, say, how Nile Monitors live in the wild - I just want to make sure I can successfully keep the one we've got alive and happy. If I start to have trouble, I'll be reading more about how he might be living in the wild in order to improve his conditions; if we're going fine, I am happy to stick with what works. On the other hand, I AM interested in how leopard geckos live in the wild, and I'd love to go and SEE how they live in the wild someday.

Yes - there's as much of a difference between a herpetologist and a reptile keeper as there is between David Mech, who went and lived with wild wolves, and a person who's got a Jack Russell puppy piddling on their carpet. It doesn't make the pet keeper wrong - it just makes them not a scientist.

Not all herpetologists keep reptiles - and early herpetologists certainly did things we'd find abhorrent now, like clipping the toes/ventral scales of animals they were studying - this is actually advocated for identification in my copy of Peterson's Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians - and not all reptile keepers are herpetologists.

Some people are pet keepers at heart.
Some people are scientists at heart.
Some people meet somewhere in the middle. I'm one of those.

Though my personal scientific interest is in the colour genetics as much as it is in the natural habitat and behaviour of the animals in question!

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- Ssthisto

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This is, in my opinion, a hands on hobby.

You can be "knowledgeable" and have read a lot of books, done a lot of research... that doesn't mean that you could keep the reptiles alive in captivity or that you can put any practical application to that knowledge.

Knowledge and hands on experience need to go hand in hand. I have been breeding corn snakes for over 10 years and I still learn something new all the time.

So for me, it's not about collecting and it's not about what you know - it's how you use it, it's about experiencing, learning, growing, being willing to embrace new ideas and adapt.

I choose corn snake morphs because they are so versatile, and there is still so much to explore genetically. I know sometimes it seems like kids in a candy store picking out their new colours, but for some, it's still about expanding, exploring, developing new things, pushing the boundaries..

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Also available right now for rehoming: 1 x Juvenile Male Bearded Dragon, 1 x Adult Female Curlytail Lizard

all good points! i admit i see some of these animals and i do go ga-ga!! i feel that all camps are just facets of the overall hobby. the same thing has been going on in the fish keeping area for much, much longer! i just wanted to see other's veiws on the subject. it's a good area of pursuit when all types can be in the hobby. something for most anyone's taste.

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I'm in both camps really.. I always like to try and get pue normals.. well as good as I can get. This is just the purest in me.

At the same time I do like some morphs.. the amount of work that people put into it is staggering.. but of course that also 'breeds' the people who see £ signs and get into it for the wrong reasons (imo).

As long as the originals are preserved and don't disapear, I'm happy enough.

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Personally as i'm not into breeding i wouldn't go trying to create different morphs but captive bred morphs are just really forcing together 2 'partners' that could breed naturally in the wild. It's just really a case of speeding up nature, nobody can categorically state that it won't happen if the different morphs crosses past during breeding season. Except of course if you're breeding 2 reps who's paths wouldn't normally cross.
Again with most man made morphs some of these morphs may already exist in the wild but not in the quantities we see on forums and google searches so we don't know about them.

(if that doesn't make sense its because i'm watching next weeks Prison Break as well)

Plus it'd be wrong for me to be against morphs seeing as my uncle is Eric Davies / Ricky Page

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Dogs 2 of themsnakes3 of them.

Oh boy! What a subject, where do I start?
Like Habu I started keeping ‘exotics’ at the beginning if the seventies having kept a selection of native herps for a couple of years previous to that. Back then if some one offered you a captive bred reptile it was probably the result of a wild caught female giving birth on arrival at the pet shop and I don’t think I even heard the word ‘morph’ used until well into the eighties.
Back then, like Habu said, I used field guides to work out how to keep my animals, in fact I often had to use the field guides to work out what it was I had just brought.
Part of the excitement of the hobby was going down to the local importers at the weekend to see what wonderful new jewels had arrived during the week. As a teenager I would often arrive home with my new acquisition, armed only with information like "they were in a consignment from South Africa and look like some kind of mini Sun Gazer", and when there was a name, well, I once brought a nice little Anolis that grew into a four foot long spiny tailed iguana oops.
I was lucky when it came to caging as my father was a carpenter but for most keepers it was converted cupboards and fish tanks. Heating was light bulbs and if you wanted to actually control the heat you had to use fish tank thermostats. I did at one point find a source of UV lighting but it was designed for use in disco’s and I have no idea what the strength of the UV was, in fact I just thought UV was one strength.
Live food was pretty much as now, we had crickets and locusts but they arrived in plastic tubs and some poor Saturday kid (me) spent hours counting them out into plastic bags. Rodents arrived from the breeder still alive and some poor Saturday lad (guess who) had to kill them and bag them as required by the customers.
Coming back to today I do see a lot of positive developments. It is great that you can get care sheets and indeed books on most of the animals available. It has never been so easy to replicate the specific environment for any given species and the range of equipment seems endless as does the choice of colour morphs available in a select number of species BUT it seems to me that we have lost a lot as well. Far too many people have brought into the anti wild caught ideology and have excepted the miss information put out by groups like Animal Aid. Without wild caught we wouldn’t have any of the reptiles we have today and without it continuing we will not see any new species entering the hobby. We are already losing the diversity of animals that used to be available, a walk around a reptile show in the early nineties would reveal thirty plus different spacies of snake and as many as forty different species of lizard. At last months Basildon show ninety-five percent of the stock consisted of just five species (Royals, Corns, Kings, Beardies and Leos). There might of been forty different morphs available but the variety of species was gone. I can’t help but feel sad at this loss of diversity and suspect that we may well have already lost a lot of potentially very popular species and I do fear that the craze in morphs is gradually leading us away from reptile keeping and into some weird version of live stamp collecting.

I sometimes wish I could go back to about 1980 but still have all the equipment and knowledge of 2007 LOL

Natrix

it's artificial verses natural selection...

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