NEWHERP Northeast Wisconsin Herpetological Foundation A Division Of Porterfield Exotics

Last Updated On 12/02/2011

Captive Herp Care Over our many years in the field of herpetological endeavors we have kept and cared for thousands of individual herps of hundreds of different species.  In our early years in this field it was very difficult to properly care for herps as there was very little known about the captive care of most herps.  We would study their natural habitat and do our best to imitate that environment in a captive setting the best we could.  There were not very many commercially available products for keeping herps so we had to customize, improvise and make due with what we had available.  You could not buy the proper UV lamp bulbs for basking lizards so we did our best to make due with grow lamps for plants.  There were not many tank heating devices available and many of the first available ones were dangerous to the herps and the home.  Many a lizard was burned by sitting on early hot rocks that got so hot they literally could cook your lizards skin off.  Some early under tank type heaters were known to short out, start on fire and burn down homes.  Light bulbs were often used as a primary heat source for many reptile species but we really did not know just what temperatures we should be keeping our herps for day and night temperatures.  The internet was a long way from being invented and books on herps were very vague, hard to come by and only barely described them in their natural habitats.  We had to hunt hard to find books that gave us the very basics such as what regions various species were from and what the climates were like in those regions.  Then there were all the things we knew very little about such as internal and external parasites that the wild caught herps came in heavily infested with.  Again there were no available herp tested parasite treatment products so we had to experiment with products we knew to work for treatment of other creatures.  Now what about dosages, again it was trial and error.  Many herps died within a short time of being imported and we had to figure out what was the cause of death, was it stress, parasites, wrong foods, wrong climates, wrong treatment dosages and so on.  Gradually more and more information was documented and shared by amongst the growing number of herpetocultural enthusiasts and today one can google almost any animal and get advise from several sources as to the best care of it.  Please remember that just because something is posted online does not make it true and correct.  Always read from multiple sources and research the qualifications of your source before you make any drastic moves in the keeping of your herps.  On this page we will be placing links to herp care methods that have worked for us and others.  We do consider ourselves quite knowledgeablein the field of herpetology but we also encourage you to verify our ideas with other experienced herpers as well, the newest latest and best information in this field changes rapidly so even we could be a bit behind on some things.