I am an avid traveler, photographer, animal breeder and biologist.

Geochelone nigra porteri

© 2007 Eric V. Anderson

My Story:

Growing up, I was fortunate enough live in a number of unusual places and travel extensively. By the time I graduated high school, I had lived half my life overseas and had visited 36 different countries. While I was born in the United States, my first memories as a child were of visiting mangroves on my dad’s shoulders to see water monitors and macaques while living in Jakarta, Indonesia. living and going to school in these diverse places was an incredible experience and allowed my family and I to visit a number of places that would have otherwise been much less accessible. Doing so instilled a love for travel, an appreciation for nature and a desire to explore.

From as early as I can remember, I always had pets and encouragement from my parents to learn about them and fulfill my responsibilities of caring for them. In addition to the pleasure associated with having a pet, my exposure to animals in captivity helped foster an interest in biological questions. When I was 7 I started breeding chinchillas, eventually working up to crossing color mutations to teach myself about the genetic inheritance of color mutations in chinchillas. This topic went on to be the topic of my high school senior thesis based on the genetic crosses I had done over the years. In 1997 I got my first chameleon and I was instantly hooked. This pet quickly turned into an obsession that ultimately resulted in the development of a number of chameleon related websites, trips to see and study chameleons in their natural habitat, numerous popular press articles on their care and natural history, and experience with over 50 different species in captivity, including breeding many of those.

After graduating high school, I moved to upstate New York to attend Cornell University where I received my B.S. degree in Animal Science in 2006. Currently, I am a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida in Stephen M. Deban’s lab. Here, my dissertation research is on the effect of temperature on ballistic tongue projection and tongue retraction in chameleons.

Excited to be able to work with the animals and questions I love as my job, I still, to this day, keep and breed chinchillas, chameleons and a number of other animals and I am still an avid traveler.