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MISSION · CULEBRA CONSERVATION

captive knowledge. wild outcomes.

There is more expertise sitting inside private reptile collections right now than in almost any university on Earth — lifetimes of knowledge about how these animals breed, heal, behave, and survive. For decades, almost none of it reached the wild. It stayed locked behind glass, in the heads of the people who earned it, and too often it died with them.

Citadel Culebra exists to break that open. The best captive expertise on the planet belongs in the field — in habitat restoration, in venom research that saves human lives, in urban removal, in anti-poaching, in the policy fights that decide whether a species has a future at all. Conservation is the discipline that connects what we know to what we actually do about it. It is not a department here. It is the entire point.

THE PEOPLE · WHO WALK THE WALK

Conservation isn't a slogan. It's the people doing the work.

Anyone can post about saving wildlife. Far fewer spend their own time, money, and weekends in the field actually doing it. Two of the people behind Citadel Culebra do exactly that — and we want to salute them.

Kevin McCurley
The conservationist you didn't know about
Kevin McCurley
KeeperBreederConservationist

Most people know Kevin McCurley as a world-class breeder and expert handler — to many of us, the modern GOAT of reptile keeping. What far fewer people know is that he's just as heavily invested in conservation, quietly doing the kind of field work that never makes the headlines.

He leads hands-on initiatives protecting some of North America's most vulnerable reptiles — Blanding's and common snapping turtles among them — locating and guarding wild nests from the subsidized predators that destroy the overwhelming majority of clutches, then head-starting hatchlings through their most dangerous first year before releasing them at a size that can actually survive. He's deeply involved in American alligator conservation, with more initiatives on the way.

He walks the walk and talks the talk — and he's the entire thesis of Citadel Culebra in one person: the best keepers alive are some of the best conservationists alive.

Dr. Steve Dinkelacker
The science behind the work
Dr. Steve Dinkelacker
Ph.D. HerpetologistField ResearcherSeasoned Breeder & Handler

Dr. Steve Dinkelacker is a Ph.D. herpetologist, biology professor, and field researcher — and one of the people putting hard science behind our conservation work. But he isn't only an academic: he brings the hands-on credibility of a seasoned breeder and handler, the rare scientist who's just as comfortable in a collection as in a peer-reviewed journal.

Since 1998 he has studied turtle populations across the United States — bog, spotted, and Blanding's turtles through to common and alligator snapping turtles — and published peer-reviewed research on American alligators. Since 2011 he has led an ongoing mark-recapture program on American alligators across the Albemarle Peninsula of North Carolina: exactly the kind of long-term, measured fieldwork real conservation runs on.

Field rigor paired with the classroom — a longtime professor and a pioneer of online science teaching. We salute him alongside Kevin: proof that keeping, breeding, and conservation were always meant to be the same calling.

Kevin McCurley — Blanding's turtle field work
FLAGSHIP FIELD WORK · KEVIN McCURLEY

The Blanding's turtle can't out-breed the modern world.

The Blanding's turtle is a survivor of a slower world. It can live more than seventy years, but it does not reach sexual maturity until somewhere between fourteen and twenty years old — and even then a female may nest only once a year, laying a single small clutch. That life-history strategy worked for ten thousand years. It evolved for a landscape with time in it.

The modern world gave it none. Roads now cut straight through the wetlands these turtles travel between, and a nesting female crossing a highway is a female that often never comes back. Development drains and fragments the marshes. And the nests that do get laid are raided at staggering rates by subsidized predators — raccoons, skunks, and foxes whose populations have exploded alongside ours — so that in many areas almost no eggs survive to hatch at all.

Do the math and it is brutal: a species that needs two decades to replace a single breeding adult cannot absorb that kind of loss. The adults you see in a marsh today may be old animals with no recruitment behind them — a population that looks stable and is actually a generation from collapse. They are not dying out because they are weak. They are dying out because they are slow, in a world that suddenly got very fast.

That is exactly the gap captive expertise was built to close. Kevin McCurley — four decades of breeding and husbandry mastery behind him — leads field work that buys these turtles back the time the modern world took: protecting wild nests from predators, head-starting hatchlings through their most vulnerable first year in expert care and releasing them at a size that can actually survive, and monitoring populations so the work is measured, not guessed. It is the clearest proof of everything Citadel Culebra believes — that the best keepers alive are some of the best conservationists alive, and that knowledge kept behind glass was always meant for the field.

Read the full Blanding's turtle work →
THE WORK · OUR INITIATIVES

Four fronts, one mission.

PROGRAM 01 · OUR #1 FOCUSACTIVE

Culebra Conservation

Reptile conservation — starting with the snakebite crisis.

Snakebite InitiativeField workBreeding for release

Culebra Conservation is our reptile conservation program — and our number one focus is the crisis almost nobody is talking about: snakebite. Snakebite envenoming kills somewhere between 81,000 and 138,000 people every year and leaves roughly 400,000 more with amputations or permanent disability — overwhelmingly the rural poor of the Global South. The World Health Organization calls it one of the biggest public-health crises you've never heard of.

We're working to partner with the Snakebite Initiative to help bring those numbers down — supporting antivenom access, education, and the field knowledge that keepers uniquely hold. Nobody understands these animals like the people who keep them, and that expertise can save human lives while protecting the snakes that are slaughtered out of fear. Habitat work, monitoring, relocation, and breeding-for-release run underneath it all.

Explore Culebra Conservation →
Culebra Conservation
81,000–138,000
people killed by snakebite every year
02
PROGRAM 02 · LANDIN PROGRESS

Steve-O Wildlife Land Trust

Buy the land. Hold it wild. Forever.

Private preserveHabitatIndigenous species

The most direct way to protect a species is to protect the ground it lives on. The Steve-O Wildlife Land Trust is an initiative we're launching to purchase land and hold it privately — kept as a nature preserve and protected habitat, owned outright rather than left to the whims of development or shifting policy.

We'll outfit each property to be the ideal environment for whatever species is indigenous to that area — restoring habitat, easing pressure, and letting the land do what it does best. Private ownership, public purpose: wild places, permanently kept wild.

Warren Wildlife AlliancePROGRAM 03 · GLOBAL · ZAMBEZI RIVERIN PROGRESS

Warren Wildlife Alliance

Crocodiles, communities, and coexistence on the Zambezi.

Crocodile researchAnti-poachingCommunity

The Warren Wildlife Alliance is our global conservation arm, and its flagship work takes us to the Zambezi River — where we're building crocodile research initiatives alongside efforts to improve the lives of the people who live there.

The delta's fishing villages depend on the river to survive, and overfishing has pushed that balance to a breaking point — for the people and for the crocodiles they share the water with, with escalating, often deadly human–crocodile conflict the result. We're pairing active crocodile research with the real-estate and development expertise to ease the pressure on the river and help people and crocodiles coexist instead of compete. Several crocodile research initiatives are in progress now.

See the Warren Wildlife Alliance →
04
PROGRAM 04 · ALLIANCE · AWARENESSALLIANCE PARTNER

Stand with Ivan Carter

A rhino and an elephant are going extinct in real time.

Anti-poachingRhino & elephantCommunity
Every ~15 min
an elephant or rhino is killed for ivory or horn

Ivan Carter is one of the most important voices in wildlife conservation alive — a tracker, conservationist, and founder of the Ivan Carter Wildlife Conservation Alliance, leading anti-poaching and human–wildlife-coexistence work across Africa. He's the reason the Zambezi crisis is on our radar at all.

And the clock is brutal. An elephant or a rhino is slaughtered for its ivory or horn roughly every 15 to 45 minutes — two of the most iconic animals on Earth, pushed toward extinction in real time. They need every bit of support and awareness they can get. We want to bring this community together to back Ivan Carter and get him what he needs, because awareness without action is just noise.

Ivan Carter Wildlife Conservation Alliance →
OUR DUTY

We are wiping species off the planet.

This is the part no one who loves animals is allowed to look away from. We are killing wildlife at a pace the planet hasn't seen in millions of years. An elephant or a rhino is slaughtered for its ivory or horn roughly every 15 to 45 minutes. We have destroyed entire populations of animals — and some are simply gone: the baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin, was declared functionally extinct in China, the first dolphin species driven to extinction by human hands.

We keep animals in captivity. We love these animals. And that love cannot end at the glass. There has to be a foundation of conservation underneath everything we do — because the people who dedicate their lives to animals are exactly the people who should have the loudest voices for them.

That's not optional. It's our duty. Citadel Culebra intends to use every bit of reach, knowledge, and resource we have to push for conservation — loudly, relentlessly, and for as long as it takes.

WHY IT ALL MATTERS

everything ties back to conservation.

Strip away the courses, the community, the technology, and the marketplace, and you're left with one purpose underneath all of it: keeping these animals alive — in our care, and in the wild.

Every animal kept well is a small act of conservation. Every keeper we teach is a multiplier. Every record logged, every breeding documented, every behavior observed and shared becomes knowledge that protects the next animal, and the one after that. A keeper who learns to read the early warning signs saves the animal in front of them today — and the dozens they'll keep over a lifetime. That is how a hobby becomes a force.

This is the conversation reptile people have been having quietly for forty years, and the one we intend to have loudly, on the record, forever. The better we get at keeping, the more we can give back. The more we give back, the more of the wild survives. As keepers and animal lovers, that mission is now ours to carry — to educate, to turn fear into understanding, and to help the world see these animals for what they truly are.

Everything here leads back to that. Every single time.

Education is the bridge. Everything you learn here can end up protecting an animal in the wild.

Reptile conservation

Habitat work, monitoring, relocation, breeding for release.

Crocodilian research

Field study + captive-population science for crocs + alligators.

Venom research

Medical and academic partnerships, antivenom pipelines.

Urban removal

Safe, ethical removal — keepers as first responders.

Field study

Snakes, lizards, and tortoises in their habitat, on the record.

The curriculum

All of this feeds back into the Conservation discipline curriculum.

Join the founding class →