Steve Angeli

Senior Advisor

Venomous · Heloderma · Breeding

Horridum Angeli

Steve runs Horridum Angeli in California and is one of the most prolific Heloderma breeders alive. He was hooked at three, when his mother found western fence lizards in shoeboxes under his bed. He bought his first beaded lizard from Bob Applegate in 1998 and has been breeding beaded lizards since 2001 and Gila monsters since 2010. Over his career he's produced roughly two thousand beaded lizards, three hundred Gila monsters, and seventy-six Heloderma alvarezi, the Chiapan black beaded lizard. He imported those under CITES permits from Mexico in 2017 and was the first to breed them outside the zoos of Mexico and South America. He keeps nine unrelated pure exasperatum bloodlines, the Super Black horridum line, and the Wright Line Gilas. He also breeds venomous snakes, including the zebra spitting cobra. He built the whole system himself, the racks, the cooling cycle, the dry-egg incubation he learned from Applegate's 1983 corn snake book. It works. He's taken his share of bites. He holds California's Restricted Species permit and wrote the Citadel's Heloderma book.

Steve Angeli is Senior Advisor and a member of the faculty at Citadel Culebra, the online school of reptile-keeping, and is associated with Horridum Angeli.

Find Steve A. at: helodermahorridum.com