What is the Herp Center?
Our mission is to promote the understanding and conservation of reptiles and amphibians
of the Midwestern United States and beyond through research, education
and outreach. The Herp Center is involved in a variety of activities,
including research on endangered herps and the development of recommendations
for species management. The Herp Center was established in summer 2000. It is located in the Science
Building at Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW),
in northeastern Indiana. By design, our intent is to link people with
needs to individuals and organizations with the expertise to address those
needs. Thus our “facilities” extend beyond those available at
IPFW. That said, we operate in association with the Department
of Biology at IPFW. With four faculty in the department with research interests overlapping in the areas of
herpetology and conservation, we provide a unique environment for exploring
these topics.
Announcements
We have just launched our Facebook page, IPFW Herpetology Center. Please visit and let us know what you would like to see there! IT is Beta now, so please "like" it so we earn our public URL. Thanks. For fun, we will post mystery herp pictures on there and let people guess what they are. If no one figures it out the hints will get easier (or the pictures more inclusive). Try it!
Behind the scenes, we continue to gradually work on switching to our new web site. Please let us know if you see errors of any kind. The new species accounts are still in the works, so be patient with us on that front. As before, you can always send us photos to identify, and we can provide specific accounts if you have an immeidate need.
The Herp Center is currently out of copies of the first edition of the Habitat Management Guidelines (HMGs) for Reptiles and Amphibians of the Midwest. The guidelines are currently being redesigned and reprinted. In the meantime, modules comprising much of the first edition are still available as PDFs for download.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
We encourage you to use our contact information (left), ask us questions, and send us photos to identify herps. We do get certain questions on a regular basis, however, such as "Did I just see a Cottonmouth (probably not!)?" For those we have created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page. Please consider visiting it first before shooting us your questions - the answer might already be there!
