Welcome to RobsRegius.

As a graduate Zoologist who has been studying, keeping and breeding reptiles and amphibians for many decades, I wanted to apply a more scientific approach to this fascinating endeavour.

When I began keeping “Herptiles” as a kid, there was a fair amount of information available in the form of books and even the odd magazine article. There were some great hobbyist oriented Herpetological societies and one or two catering more for the professionals and academics. There was no Internet! The advent of the internet and the ease of sharing and looking up information has transformed the hobby. But at the same time has opened up a new potentially very negative problem – much of the content lacking any kind of editor intervention, review or censorship; now everyone is an instant expert and is free to pass on their “knowledge”, which often came from an equally dubious and unedited source or sources.

The bad thing about the “Good Old Days” of Herpetology was that it was about all we could do to keep the animals alive, breeding was a rare event and the usually wild-caught charges were often kept in line with the Victorian Naturalist philosophy – hobbyists usually having a varied hotch potch of species and having potential breeding pairs was the exception rather than the rule.

In many ways I consider myself and others like me as fortunate to have lived through and directly experienced the transformation that the hobby of herpetoculture has undergone. The key to success, apart from all the hard work by early pioneers (and it has to be said, sometimes the sacrifices made by their charges), was Captive Breeding. Species such as Python regius, which were notoriously bad feeders and difficult to maintain at all successfully, took on a completely new identity in the form of captive bred young. The first generation of captive born individuals heralded a complete turn around in the health, well-being and breeding success of pretty much all species concerned. These parasite free, pre-adapted and unencumbered individuals formed the basis of the current hobby with numerous species bred to countless generations; bringing along other changes such as colour morphs, mutations and even inter-specific cross breeds.

This site will be my attempt to publish filtered (as in reliable) information that is as objective as possible and not just re-hashed third hand net gossip, spread like a game of Chinese Whispers. I´m aware I am certainly not the only person using this approach and will be crediting others where possible as well as pointing readers to other such resources.