 Pythons aplenty and geckos galore at expo
By Chrissy Ewald of the Daily Courier
CENTRAL POINT — The second annual Medford Metro Reptile Expo brought over 40 vendors, hundreds of visitors and a wide variety of snakes, tortoises and lizards to the Jackson County Expo on Saturday.
The event is one of four reptile expos organized each year by Northwest Reptile Expos, owned by John and CC Deaton. Two are held in Portland, one in Seattle and one in the Medford area.
All of the animals brought by vendors are bred in captivity.
Leah Fullerton of Redding Reptiles out of California specializes in ball pythons. She said with ball pythons, there are so many already in captivity that there's no point in importing more.
Nonvenomous and docile, ball pythons are popular as pets. The species is native to sub-Saharan Africa and is a target of poaching for the international exotic pet trade.
Fullerton said they can live a very long time. One female, she said, lived until the age of 62. Female ball pythons are also capable of parthenogenesis, where they can reproduce without a male. However, Fullerton said, those offspring are unlikely to live as long.
For some vendors, reptile breeding is a job. For others, it's a very involved hobby.
Jeffrey and Lauren Ott of Central Point were selling crested geckos, native to the southern parts of the islands of New Caledonia, east of Australia. Jeffrey Ott hatched all but one of them himself.
The Medford expo is the only event of the year at which the couple sells reptiles.
"They live at room temperature, so they're very easy to take care of," Ott said. "They love 68 to 78 degrees."
He described crested geckos as a good "starter reptile." "They look really mean, they look really spiky, but they're not. They're super soft, they feel like velvet," he said.
In the wild, crested geckos are brown, Ott said. But selective breeding has introduced mottles and white patches; several of Ott's geckos had white tails.
Reptiles are a lifelong interest for him.
"I was into reptiles my whole life," Ott said. "As a kid, I had a chameleon and fish and geckos and things like that. As I got older, I had them and I accidentally got eggs, so I had babies, and it kind of started from there." He now breeds multiple different species of gecko, all from New Caledonia.
Toward the front of the room, Urban Jungle Reptiles of Salem hosted several vendors, each selling a species they specialize in.
John Peterson brought two tanks with poison dart frogs, though he was able to touch them with bare hands. That's because the poison that secretes from the frogs' skin is a result of their diet in the wild, where they eat toxic arthropods. In captivity, Peterson feeds his frogs flightless fruit flies, which don't contain the toxins, which in turn means the frogs don't have significant levels of toxins like their wild counterparts.
"Some of them are very poisonous," Peterson said. "This little orange guy right here, the orange blackfoot terribilis — when he's an adult, if you were to bump into him in Colombia, he would have enough toxins to kill about 15 grown men."
Different species of dart frogs come from different areas of northern South America and Central America. Peterson said they usually live about 20 years, but they're pretty simple to keep.
"Sixty-five to 75 degrees is perfect. They don't need UVB light. … Very simple, easy pet," he said. "The easiest pet I've ever had. That's why I have 47 kinds now."
This is the second year Northwest Reptile Expos has held an event in the Medford area, but the company has been around since 2005. Courtney and Joel Ebarb, lifelong reptile enthusiasts, had moved from Indiana to Oregon after college in 2004 and were surprised to find only one exotic animal show per year.
"When my husband moved out here, and there was only one show a year, he said, 'Man, I've got to do something about this,'" Courtney said. She was staffing a booth selling out-of-print reptile magazines in protective plastic sleeves, from Joel Ebarb's own collection. One cover featured Slash from Guns N' Roses with a snake, and another had an illustration of Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin.
"The one-day show is really big to him — most shows are two days," she said. "We like one day because it's better for the animals. It's less stress for them. They don't have to live in confinement, cages for as long."
The couple's first show was in Wilsonville and then moved to the Portland area. They started running expos in Seattle in 2008, and sold the operation to John and CC Deaton a few years later.
Courtney Ebarb said she's surprised by how many women come to shows. "Even in Indiana, I would say it was definitely more of a male-driven industry," she said. "So that's definitely changed."
And she said people are more educated at this type of event. "It's no longer like, 'I'm just going to take a snake and throw it in an aquarium and just leave it there with a heat rock.' They know better," she said.
"You'll see a huge plethora of different types of vendors here," her husband said. "It really breaks the mold and cliche when you come and see that it's really professional. A lot of people think it's going to be toads in a fish tank or something like that, but it's not at all. As you can see, people take this very seriously."
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Reach reporter Chrissy Ewald at 541-474-3806 or cewald@thedailycourier.com. |
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