Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hey, i am considering doing something related to reptiles when i grow up, so i was wondering what exactly you do as a herpatoligist, is it just like breeding reptiles and stuffs or what, and how good is the payout?

This link explains herpetology as a career

www.ku.edu/~ssar/career.html
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Sarah Stettler aka Starling
Sarah@stargecko.com
StarGecko.Com COMING SOON! Star Quality Leopard Geckos
Specializing in Hypotangerine Tremper Albinos

Here's a link to an article about a guy who's a field herpetologist. Basically when you work for a big university (and this isn't just for biology), your value to the school depends on the kind of research you do and what it brings back to the school whether it's money or recognition.
Link

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chickabowwow

RISING STARS The Sweet Sound of Frogs By ROBIN WILSON
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i02/02a01001.htm Before Rafe Brown even enrolled in graduate school, he had already won a research grant to study Italian lizards and submitted his first paper to a scholarly journal. He had also spent several months in South Korea and the Philippines doing scientific fieldwork on reptiles and amphibians.

Now, Mr. Brown has been offered two of the country's most prized academic jobs in herpetology -- before he has completed his Ph.D.

At the University of Kansas at Lawrence he'll be an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and assistant curator at the university's Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. And Kansas was so impressed with him this spring that it agreed to wait a year and a half to bring him on board. He will start there in January 2005, after he completes his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley.

When Mr. Brown visited Kansas for an interview, "we could all just sense we had a star here," says Craig E. Martin, chairman of the department. "He was the person who just blew everybody away."

His dissertation on the evolution of Asian forest frogs in the Philippines is a multipronged project, any piece of which would have amounted to an adequate doctoral thesis, his advisers say. Mr. Brown has published 27 articles in scholarly journals -- at least a dozen more than is considered impressive for a graduate student in his field.

He is just the latest of several young herpetologists in David C. Cannatella's UT laboratory who have received job offers before earning their Ph.D.'s. "All of the jobs they've gotten have been really desirable ones that everyone was talking about," says Mr. Cannatella, an assistant professor of biology.

During his research in some of the most remote places in Southeast Asia, Mr. Brown has had many adventures while working through the night -- when the frogs are awake. In one incident, he came up over a hill on a logging road to encounter members of the Philippine Army, guns drawn. They lowered their weapons when "I raised my hands and told them, 'I'm just a biologist,'" recalls Mr. Brown. Another time, while crawling around on his hands and knees searching for frogs, he set off a trip line and was nearly hit by an 8-foot-long spear that hunters had set in a trap to kill a wild pig.

"Even as a student, he has organized field expeditions in some of the toughest areas of the world and managed to get through all of the very difficult bureaucracy of getting permits, arranging transport, and getting field supplies," says Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at Kansas. "He's shown the kind of leadership and organizational abilities that are quite rare among senior graduate students. Hell, they're quite rare among most faculty members."

As a freshman at Reed College, Mr. Brown intended to major in English (his mother named him after a character in a Faulkner novel), but he switched to biology after taking a trip to South Korea with a Reed professor who was studying the reproduction and ecology of fire-bellied toads.

The summer after his sophomore year, Mr. Brown applied for a grant of his own and received $2,000 from Reed to study Italian wall lizards in his hometown, Cincinnati. The lizards had been transplanted there by an Italian émigré in the 1950s.

After the stock market crashed in 1989, tuition at Reed was out of reach for his parents, both schoolteachers, so Mr. Brown enrolled at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. While there he was the only undergraduate chosen in 1991 for an expedition financed by the MacArthur Foundation to inventory reptiles and amphibians in the Philippines. Mr. Brown took time off from classes to spend nearly a year and a half on the project, collecting snakes, lizards, frogs, and turtles.

He found species that scientists had never recorded -- including a lizard he and his colleagues dubbed the parachute gecko because of flaps that allowed it to glide from tree to tree at the top of the forest canopy.

With so much research experience under his belt, Mr. Brown was ready for action when he enrolled in the doctoral program at Texas in 1997. He wanted to study the reproduction of Asian forest frogs in the Philippines, and traveled there to collect eggs. But the project quickly proved difficult. "One night in the forest, I had been sifting through leaf litter and trying to find these eggs for eight hours," recalls Mr. Brown. "It was 3 o'clock in the morning, rainy and muddy, and I turned off my head lamp and sat down on a log. In the dark around me I heard the voices of all these frogs that were breeding." Right then, he decided to reorient his project from the frogs' reproductive strategy to the evolution of their communication system.

He won a highly coveted $10,000 "dissertation improvement grant" from the National Science Foundation, which allowed him to buy sensitive recording equipment and finance four more trips to the Philippines. During his fieldwork, he connected with Filipino scientists, writing several papers with them and learning to speak Tagalog.

Because the small forest frogs look alike -- most are brown or black with large bright eyes -- earlier scientists had thought there were only a handful of species. But Mr. Brown and his co-workers have discovered as many as 60. It is the frogs' mating calls that have allowed Mr. Brown to tell them apart: Some use whistles, others use squeaks, and still others have pulsating calls.

Mr. Brown has taken liver-tissue samples from the frogs to complete DNA analyses and construct an evolutionary tree of the various species. He's also studied their body shapes and the acoustic variation of their mating calls, and tried to determine whether where the frogs live influences the sounds they make.

Spending months in a tent in the rain forests, however, has its hazards. In 1999, while working in Indonesia, Mr. Brown and a fellow Texas graduate student contracted typhoid fever. The two spent hundreds of dollars on international telephone calls to a biologist working at the Centers for Disease Control, who consulted with doctors, diagnosed the fever, and prescribed the right antibiotic.

"I was really worried that we might not make it," recalls Mr. Brown. "I was on a half-hour cycle of intense hot fever ... and then incredible chills and spasms that were so strong I could barely move my arms." It took him a couple of months to recover fully.

Colleagues and friends describe Mr. Brown as affable, with a notable maturity and confidence. "Talking to many academics is like walking into the blindman knife-throwing contest," remarks Mr. Krishtalka. "Rafe is the kind of guy you want to go out and have a beer with."

Because he's completed so much fieldwork, Mr. Brown is older than most graduate students -- he'll turn 35 this fall. He admits that his passion for frogs has kept him from focusing on much else. Still, he is getting married next spring to a fellow Miami University graduate, a physical anthropologist who studies spider monkeys in Costa Rica.

Mr. Brown knew the postdoctoral position at Berkeley was a possibility for him this coming academic year, but when three "dream jobs" came open that would allow him to split his time between the classroom and curating at a university museum, he applied for them all: at Kansas, Louisiana State University, and Ohio State University. He got offers from the first two, and chose Kansas, which is considered a premier institution for herpetology.

Not only did Mr. Brown persuade people at Kansas to let him start a year and a half later, he negotiated a nearly $250,000 start-up research package, even though Kansas had planned to spend only about $100,000. That's in addition to his salary, which he says will be in the $50,000 range.

"Unanimity is a rare beast around here," says Linda Trueb, who headed the search committee at Kansas. "It wasn't just that he could impress this incredibly diverse faculty. He left a similar impression on all of these folks: They thought this was the Second Coming."
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chickabowwow

He was in South Korea to study fire-bellied toads? That's so cool, since I'm from South Korea!! I remember catching fire-bellied toads when I was back there more than 7 years ago!! Those toads are really cool.

Tim

Being a herpetologist can require some things. It's an exciting and a interesting career, but it's one of the most difficult branches of zoology. First of all, you'll need to major in biology, zoology, and basic chemistry and physics are included (not to mention, calculus is required for biology study, and statstics is strongly recommended). Herpetology is a branch of zoology, and it's a study of reptiles and amphibians. You'll study the classifications, behaviors, habitats, etc. You could also be working for conservation programs, do surveys in certain habitats, or study the medical uses from venomous animals. That's why some people take medical classes to get the basic ideas about making antivenoms. You must not be allergic to the biochemicals, if you're interested in working with antivenom. You can also become a teacher, a professor, or begin a wildlife facility center full of endangered herps for their conservation. If you're lucky enough and posing great acting careers (or humor), you could become a show host for channels like Animal Planet! But it's not easy to become a show host, since it requires great acting skills, humor, expert animal handling, etc. By the way, having experience with venomous snakes and dangerous crocodilians looks exciting, but it can be extremely dangerous, not to mention, causing deaths if not careful. Therefore, some of the herpetology's career's poses risking death and extreme dangers. Caution is vital, because it can save a life.

Tim

By the way, check out this site too. It covers great information.

Careers in Herpetology

Tim

I remembering hearing somewhere that being a herpetologist was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world because of all the venemous snakes and dangerous reptiles like crocs and big monitors. i might want to be a herpetologist when i grow up too.

Rob Woods

That would depend on what kind of career you partake in. You could be a herpetologist that researches, a herpetoculturist, a vet, work for a zoo, or you could go and do field work.

In answer to the first question, there probably isn't much payoff unless you're a vet, and even that's not too much money, but that's not the reason someone becomes a herpetologist.
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