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Reprinted from Who Magazine, August 7, 1995
Deep in the bowels of Marcia Rybak's stately home in the posh Chicago Suburb of Lake Forest, a strange feeding ritual is under way. Rybak, an amateur herpetologist (or reptile fancier), has sprinkled live crickets with powdered vitamins and is now dangling their spindly forms over an aquarium. Within seconds, tiny prehistoric mouths snap shut around the nutrient-encrusted insects and the keeper smiles indulgently. "They're so responsive, like little puppy dogs,"
Rybak, 43, marvels. "I think they're the world's most perfect lizard." Rybak, a computer programmer turned lizard fanatic, has a right to be proud of the reptiles - she is, in a sense, their mother.
Rybak produced the new breed of lizard, which she has dubbed the vittikin, by cross-breeding two Australian reptiles: the 30cm Rankin's dragon (Pogona brevis) and the 50cm inland bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps). The pocket-size vittikins combine the good nature of the inland bearded with the compact size of the Rankin's in an easily handled, 30cm lizard with a pleasant disposition. "Sort of a munchkin version of the vitticeps," she explains. "Hence, the name vittikin."
Rybak hopes they may one day rival dogs, cats and hamsters as America's domestic pet of choice - she's already selling them for $100 a pop and says if other breeders follow suit, they may soon be available in pet shops.
Rybak has clearly warmed to the cold-blooded creatures: She has about 200 in the basement of the house she shares with husband Steve Uhring. She points out that cats and dogs have been crossbred for centuries and says designer snakes are bred "for colours and patterns. So why not lizards?"
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Although the "inventor" of the crossbreed, Rybak encourages other breeders to copy her design and says she's not rearing the reptiles for remuneration. "Marcia is a great spokesperson for reptiles," says Philippe de Vosjoli, president of the American Federation of Herpetoculturists and publisher of Vivarian Magazine, a bi-monthly journal about snakes and lizards. "She's very careful, very methodical about her work."
Rybak also finds time to sit as president of the Chicago Herpetological Society and secretary of the National Herpetological Alliance. Last year, her passion brought her to Australia for the Second World Congress of Herpetology, in Adelaide. "I got the chance to meet all these Australian herpetologists," she enthuses. "They're my heroes. I have all their books." One of them, Harold Cogger, a research fellow of the Australian Museum and author of Australian Reptiles and Amphibians, has heard of Rybak's vittikins. "It sounds like an interesting development," says Cogger, 60, who has no concerns about breeders creating new species for domestic pet markets. "As long as they're not released back into the wild, I don't have a philosophical problem with it at all," he says. "The right reptiles make excellent pets."
It was a wild lizard, however, that first caught Rybak's attention in California back in 1986. Her miniature poodle dropped an injured alligator lizard on her doorstep and Rybak immediately developed an affinity with the creature. Despite her best efforts to save it, the lizard died but the experience had Rybak hooked. Within 24 hours she had bought 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, moving gently through the basement where she also breeds crickets, mealworms and cockroaches to feed her army of dragons. "I know it sounds dorky but I can read these animals - 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 interest in reptiles. In 1988, Rybak, who ran her own computer business in Torrance, California, met Uhring, a sales executive, through her work. "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, 48, recalls with a laugh that he thought, "'That's nice, everyone should have a hobby'...then again, I never would have dreamed that one day we'd have about 200 lizards in the house."
The couple married and moved to Chicago in 1992 when Uhring took a job with a publishing firm. Rybak closed her computer business to devote more time to reptile organisations. She channels her computer skills into a software package called TRACS, which helps breeders and herpetoculturists keep tabs on their populations.
Now, with her own population of reptiles poised to slither on to the US pet market, Rybak, who has no children of her own, has her hands full breeding the vittikins, "For children, they'll make a great first reptile. And for some," she warns, "they'll get hooked on reptiles just as I was."