Ty Park

Principal Advisor

Tortoise · Iguana husbandry · Zoological operations

Iguanaland

He founded Iguanaland in Punta Gorda, Florida, the largest reptile zoo in the world. He was six years old in South Korea when his father gave him a Reeves' turtle. His father, a professor of organic chemistry, moved the family to the University of Illinois in 1967, and by fifteen Ty's room was full of reptiles. He was pre-med because that's what a Korean son did. His father died of cancer at fifty-five during Ty's freshman year, and he switched to zoology. At twenty-three, with eight thousand dollars a neighbor wrote him a check for, he opened his first pet store, and that one turned into three. He went on to product development for a reptile supply company alongside a young vet named Mark Mitchell, was the largest Panther chameleon breeder in the country, and bought the old plant nursery in Punta Gorda in 2007 to breed animals a more ethical way, outdoors, in the Florida sun. In 2018 he started building the zoo. COVID tripled the budget. He opened on February 22, 2022. Eleven AZA zoos have donated or loaned animals to Iguanaland, including twenty-six turtles from the National Zoo and four of the ten Anegada iguanas in the United States. There are no venomous animals there, and that's on purpose. He wants people to walk in afraid and walk out saying they could handle it.

Ty Park is Principal Advisor and a member of the faculty at Citadel Culebra, the online school of reptile-keeping, and is associated with Iguanaland.

Find Ty at: iguanaland.com