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Reprinted from Pet Life Magazine February 1996
With their little "E.T." faces, the 12-inch lizards practically
leap up to snatch vitamin-powdered crickets from Marcia Rybak's fingers. "They're so
responsive - look, they cock their heads like little puppy dogs," says Rybak. "I
think they're the world's most perfect lizards." She sounds like a proud mom, and she
ought to. The lizards, which she has dubbed vittikins, are her own creation.
She may have produced a better lizard than the Australians do. She bred two species native to Down Under, taking the inland bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) and mating it with the Rankin's dragon (Pogona brevis), named for Australian herpetologist Paul Rankin.
The bearded dragon grows to be nearly 20-inches long, too big for many aquariums. So Rybak set out to shrink it.
Because Australia prohibits the exportation of animals, the Rankin's dragon has been rare in the United States. But the 12-inch lizards are in demand as pets because they're easy to keep and have sweet dispositions.
Since other hobbyists had reported inter-breeding of the two species, Rybak decided to try it out. Taking the best attributes of the bearded and the Rankin's, she created the Peke-a-poo (dog breeders' long-sought-after Pekingese/poodle crossbreed) of lizards, the vittikin. She says that her lizard creations are all Rankin's size - sort of a munchkin version of the beardeds or vitticeps - hence the name vittikin.
Rybak began her great experiment last year. Then president of
the Chicago Herpetological Society and secretary of the National Herpetological Alliance,
she heard about a fellow hobbyist who crossed the two kinds of dragons purely by accident.
Desperate to get rid of the cross-bred babies, he offered them to Rybak. "I fell in
love," says the star-crossed lizard lady. She explains that the amiable vittikins are
a pocket-sized alternative to the formidable bearded dragons, which is too much lizard for
many people to handle.
"At first, I didn't know if the vittikins were simply cute mules [sterile], or if they would reproduce." It turns out the little lizards are prolific. Rybak's are now on their second generation.
"For children, vittikins have the perfect personality to be a first reptile, far better than iguanas," she says. As a kid in Buffalo, New York, Rybak, now 44, never had a pet lizard, just miniature poodles. It was one of her pet poodles that induced her interest in cold-blooded creatures. In 1986, while living in Pacific Palisades, California, her pup dropped an injured alligator lizard on her doorstep.
Some assert that her dog was returning home to enjoy a lizard lunch. But Rybak jumps to her dog's defense. "He came to mom as if to say, 'Look, something's wrong with this little guy, can we fix it?' " Sadly, despite her best efforts, Rybak was unable to save the lizard. But the experience was enough to get her hooked. She dashed to the local pet store and purchased two starter reptiles, a curly-tailed lizard and a Bahamian anole lizard.
"Even with those two early examples, I could tell that lizards speak to me," she says, as she moves through the basement of her stately home in the posh Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, attending to her charges. A total of 200 lizards and turtles share Rybak's home. That's not to mention the crickets, mealworms and cockroaches she breeds to feed her reptilian army.
"Look, I'll show you how they frill," she says as she feeds one of her seven Australian frilled dragons. She gently pokes at the lizard, and sure enough, the flap of skin around its neck fans out. The lizard does this to appear larger to a potential predator.
"I know it sounds dorky, but I can read these animals," Rybak says, as she moves a vittikin to another exhibit to perk it up. "I can tell if they're content or distressed."
Within a year of buying those first lizards, Rybak's collection had grown to 20. About that time she divorced her first husband, although she says the split had nothing to do with her scaling new heights in the reptile field.
In 1988 Rybak, who ran her own computer business, met Steve Uhring, a sales executive. "I was attracted to him right away, so I thought he ought to know about my reptiles," Rybak explains. "After all, I had no intention of giving them up."
Uhring, who is 49, has his own interests - golf and playing the blues on his guitar. "I have my hobbies and Marcia has hers," he says. "She doesn't play the guitar and I don't play with lizards." Uhring has named only two of Rybak's multitude, both tortoises. He calls on Chowder and the other Soup.
The couple has no children, but Rybak has Sumi, her 9-year-old lilac-point Siamese cat. For obvious reasons the cat is not allowed in the basement. While most of her basement tenants live inside wire cages or aquariums, several iguanas and monitor lizards have complete freedom.
At this moment, vittikins are a hot commodity. Rybak has sold over 150 of the alluring creatures. Several hobbyists are interested in breeding, and at the California Pet Center in Woodland Hills, California, they sell out upon arrival.
However, some of Rybak's colleagues may not be so enamored with her tampering with Mother Nature. In his 1993 book The General Care and Maintenance of Bearded Dragons, author Philippe de Vosjoli, president of the American Federation of Herpetolculturists and publisher of Vivarium Magazine writes, "We do not recommend these species (bearded dragons and Rankin's) be kept together, and discourage any intentional hybridization. The hybrids are no improvement upon the pure species."
Today, however, de Vosjoli has tempered his original concerns. "I'm still cautious, but maybe it's not such a bad idea," he says. "It's a novelty, but if people can selectively breed beardeds for color, why not try this? I'm not so sure a real purist will go for it."
But at least one purist, Ray Pawley, Curator of Reptiles at the Brookfield Zoo (outside Chicago) with a 40-year career of caring for captive reptiles, says, "The more we breed lizards in captivity, the less the demand may be to take them from Australia or anywhere else in the wild. If we can breed dogs and cats to suit human desire, why not lizards. I give Marcia credit for having the grit to do this."
Rybak shrugs her shoulders. "Listen, maybe I've invented a lizard, but I haven't invented a nuclear weapon," she says. "Either it will catch on or it won't. If fewer beardeds will be crunched into spaces that are really too small for them, I will feel that I succeeded."