The History of ACR
Like most anyone who does this for a living, I have been catching and keeping reptiles for most of my life. I caught every frog, toad and snake I could get my hands on from as early as I can remember - and I'm talking since preschool age. I couldn't even begin to tell you what it is about reptiles and amphibians, but I was born completely magnetized to them.
Keeping reptiles at home started at age 7 with a couple green anoles that I got as a birthday present at the age of seven, followed shortly after by a house gecko, then native frog species as I accumulated more tanks to keep them in - down in the sub-basement of my childhood home.
I finally got the OK to have a couple snakes by 8th grade, and I had raised up a fairly big Burmese python from a hatchling by my senior year of high school, which is when the idea of doing this for a living really took hold in my mind. In 1998, about 18 months after graduating high school, I was forced to sell off the few reptiles I had. I was going to college, working full-time and still living at home...and no matter how good my pitch, I couldn't get the OK to start a reptile business being started in the basement. In 2001, I finally began putting together my existing reptile collection, with the blessing of some really patient and supportive roommates. I started with pythons of various species and I made up for lost time by putting together a pretty legit collection rather quickly. It wasn't long before the idea of doing this for a living started swirling around in my head all over again. It just didn't sound like a very doable idea, at least not yet.
I got my first crested geckos in late 2002, after reading an article about them. I started buying quite a few geckos and finally began breeding them in 2003. My first crested gecko hatched on January 4, 2004. By then, I had absolutely fallen in love with the species for a variety of reasons. Being a graphic artist and website designer by trade (at the time), I quickly became obsessed with producing designer crested geckos, an idea that almost no one had really given much thought, but something I saw as inevitable. Having seen it happen in many other species, I saw this as something that was bound to happen. Someone just needed to put in the work to develop these geckos and then put them on the market, so I decided that's what I was going to do.
In October of 2004, after leaving Gateway, Inc. (the big-name computer company I had spent 5 years working for), and having seen how quickly the popularity of crested geckos was growing, I made the decision to breed reptiles full-time, and to focus on designer crested geckos.
Needless to say, none of my friends or family really understood what I had envisioned, not to mention actually thought it was a good idea. That was OK, though - they didn't know the crested gecko like I did, not to mention the designer reptile market and genetics. Today, we maintain and breed the largest collection of crested geckos in the world (to my knowledge) and our geckos are sold all over the world.
In addition to breeding tons of crested geckos, and our cutting edge ball python morphs being bred at another facility in Wichita, KS (Milbradt Caponetto Reptiles), I also maintain a pretty good sized personal reptile collection at our gecko facility, consisting of several other species...carpet pythons, blood pythons, various boa species, gargoyle geckos, and mourning geckos.
Why did I choose the crested gecko?
A lot of reptile friends ask what made me decide to focus my efforts on a new species, rather than one that people were already making a lot of money with. Here are my main reasons, in a nutshell...
- Suitability as a Pet
Crested geckos are very easy and inexpensive to keep in captivity because they don't require heaters, lights, or live insects. Care could be compared to that of a hamster, only you keep them more humid and with less frequent cleaning and feeding. On top of that, they're about as tame as a reptile can get, they're very hardy and they live for decades. The 2002 "Reptiles, USA Annual" crested gecko article written by Allen Repashy was titled "The Perfect Pet Gecko" and it couldn't have been more appropriately titled.
- Patterns, Colors and Structure Variation
The crested gecko is a great "canvas" reptile for serious selective breeding projects. I'm not even a gecko or lizard guy - I'm more of a snake guy, when it comes to reptile morphs, and I have been absolutely obsessed with this species since 2003. I honestly feel like we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. This is the closest thing to a ball python with legs we're likely to see in our lifetimes.
- Captive Bred Sustainability
All of the crested geckos in the pet trade are bred and hatched in captivity, which makes for a pet that acclimates readily to a new home, and it puts zero pressure on the wild population. This means that the species isn't being endangered by our hobby, it means animals aren't stressed out from being plucked from the wild and landing in someone's basement, and it means that our business will never be impacted by an inability to get wild caught geckos.
- Because I Enjoy Them
Last, but not least - it's because I can't get enough of crested geckos. I wouldn't have been willing to put this much work into my collection if I wasn't crazy about working with these geckos...there are easier businesses to get into, but none that I enjoy this much. That's called passion and, if you're cut out to run a business, it'll take you places.
"Quality in Quantity"
If you're under the impression that we're just a mass producer, you've been seriously misled. Some would-be competitors and other online personalities - never serious breeders - will assert that I am "just a mass producer", implying that my geckos somehow aren't high-end because of the numbers I produce. The reality is that everything I do in the breeding process revolves around selective breeding - not on projected sales or raw numbers.
The big numbers are simply what happens when you do this for 20+ years and you don't have a revolving door of breeding stock.
All of my projects have been developed here from scratch, starting with the basic morphs available 20-something years ago. Remember that crested geckos were previously considered extinct, and had only been readily available on the reptile market for a few years when I started buying up my founding stock.
Today I will only raise up geckos that will further our selective breeding efforts or genetic diversity - and preferably both. We never keep and raise geckos in order to have a certain number of breeders. Along the same lines, it has never been about keeping prices artificially inflated, either by limiting how many nice geckos we produce or shelving inordinate numbers of certain geckos. I just do what I think is best for the project in terms of appearance and genetic diversity, and then let the details work themselves out.
One benefit to having a large number of geckos is that we have lots of options when it comes time to select our future breeding stock. Having so many options makes selective breeding projects move forward faster than ever. For example, if I find that a particular pairing produces an appearance that I like, I can almost immediately put together several unrelated breeding groups, and end up producing hundreds of unrelated, but similar looking geckos within a matter of a couple years, which I can then pick from for the next generation breeders. Back in the day, it would sometimes take years to put together a single breeding group - the Tangerine project was a prime example...took me 3 years to get a male like the original female. Large numbers also gives me the luxury of being able to try more crosses and pairings, ultimately enabling me to discover more looks that I like.
Finally, there are the facts that new alleles (or mutations of a particular gene) can and do surface, seemingly out of thin air, and we're producing thousands of geckos annually. That being the case, we're bound to have new stuff appear from time to time.
- AC
