Sandalwood Herpetology Club

The Sandalwood Herpetology Club (SHC) is pleased to continue our program in which you can learn more about a few threatened or endangered species of reptiles. At the same time, your donations will help the SHC maintain these animals and ensure that their future is bright. Adopting a reptile will help you become part of our conservation efforts to learn more about these animals and ways in which we can help them. Several species are on the brink of extinction (including 1 species we have here at Sandalwood) and without learning more about how we can help, they are sure to go the way of several species of other animals in the past. Some of these species aren't just another pretty face. Each one plays an important role in its own environment. Remember, extinction is forever!

You can help by making a donation to help us maintain our collection and enables us to work on local outreach programs. In addition to the "goodies" that you will receive, you will know that you have made an important contribution towards education of of our future scientists. Please consider one of the following animals and options for donations. Adoptions are valid for a period of 12 months.

How the Sandalwood Herpetology Club uses your donation

Your donations play a key role in the SHC achieving its goals of education and conservation. Your money goes to many aspects of maintaining our animals and assisting in future outreach programs.

	*Feeding the collection* - The animal collection at Sandalwood is not small. We maintain, on average, about 15-20 adult snakes, 15-20 juvenile snakes, 8 tortoises, and other miscellaneous reptiles off and on throughout the year. This does not include hatchlings that occur occasionally. Even though we buy our mice for the snakes wholesale, this adds up to a substantial amount during the course of a school year. Greens for the tortoises have to be purchased a few times per week.

	*Maintaining the collection* - Our collection is being housed in a variety of cages, ranging from plastic shoeboxes that are placed in racks, to glass aquariums and homemade wooden cages. As time goes on, we want to streamline how we house our animals by purchasing Vision brand cages that are uniform in size and can be stacked, locked, and still have adequate lighting and ventilation. These cages do not come cheap and will have to be purchased a few at a time. The gopher tortoises outside are relatively maintenance free. They need to be fed daily. The big ticket item for the gopher tortoises will be the webcam. This will cost us approximately $1000 and does not include a desktop computer that we can house in the library to maintain and update the live pictures daily. We hope to have a relatively new one donated to us for that purpose. Other miscellaneous expenses include mulch, light bulbs, etc.

	*Outreach* - We are about to start our seventh year. We have participated, and have been a huge draw, for the Earth Day celebration at Kid's Kampus in downtown Jacksonville for several years. We want to upgrade our display boards to a sturdier type that will make it easier to transport to this and other functions and last a long time as well. We have gone to elementary and middle schools to spread the word about reptiles and their role in the ecosystem. Buses for these trips is another expense that we have to pay for.

Adoptable Reptiles

Common Name	Scientific Name	Home Range	Status
Burmese Mountain Tortoise	Manouria emys	se Asia	"Endangered"
Dumeril's Boa	Acrantophis dumerili	s and sw Madagascar	"Endangered"
Alligator Snapping turtle	Macrochelys temminkii	se and sc US
Eastern Kingsnake	Lampropeltis getula getula	se US
Rosy Boa	Lichanura trivirgata roseofusca	sw US
Black Milksnake	Lampropeltis triangulum gaigeae	Panama and Costa Rica	small range
Reeve's Turtle	Chinemys reevesii	c and e China, Japan, Korea	"Endangered"
Florida box turtle	Terepene carolina bauri	peninsular Florida

Levels of Adoption

Type of adoption	Friend	Patron	Blue	Gold
	$25	$50	$100	<$200
Certificate of adoption	X	X	X	X
Listing on website *	X	X	X	X
Fact sheet	X	X	X	X
Photo of animal		X	X	X
t-shirt **			X	X
Banner Ad on website				X