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138 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 PASACHNIK

A contemplative Sandy Echternacht.

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 139

Even as a toddler, Sandy Echternacht wasted no time in
demonstrating an apparently innate affinity for reptiles. “I

have no idea what originally attracted me to reptiles, but I’ve
always known exactly what I wanted to do.” Sandy tells of how,
as a child, despite his mother’s distaste of lizards and snakes, he
took to them readily, distinguishing himself as the family her-
petologist as early as the age of two while on family trips to var-
ious parks in the southwestern United States. On the earliest of
these trips to the Grand Canyon, still in his mother’s arms, Sandy
was already exhibiting the symptoms of what would become a
lifetime habit, happily touching and investigating any snake
offered by the park’s rangers. 

While growing up in Iowa, Sandy delivered newspapers in
order to keep himself supplied with lizards, snakes, and even bats.
As his collection grew, he was forced to move into the attic of the
family home for fear that his collection would invade the rest of the
house. His mother had a habit of destroying snakes by chopping
them into pieces whenever she came across them, so this move
could be considered Sandy’s first contribution to conservation.

Sandy’s interest in collecting and keeping animals soon
became more academic. In an effort to learn more about the nat-
ural history and taxonomy of the species in his collection, he
wrote a letter to a biologist at Arizona State University. To Sandy’s
amazement, the professor sent a letter back and, within no time
at all, the two had become herpetological pen pals. They corre-
sponded through Sandy’s junior and senior high school years.
While still in high school, Sandy was offered a job in the profes-
sor’s lab upon his graduation. In 1957, he moved from his home-
town in Iowa to Tempe, Arizona to begin his formal studies.
Unfortunately, the relationship he once had on paper with the
professor dwindled, and Sandy returned to Iowa to attend
University and complete his bachelor’s degree in general sciences.

In 1961, Sandy was again drawn to Arizona State University,
this time to work on a master’s degree in zoology. In the follow-
ing year, Sandy was finally able to go on his first formal collect-
ing trip for the Arizona State Museum with his advisor, the
ichthyologist Dr. W. L. Minckley. They traveled to New Mexico,
México, and back through Texas on what, as Sandy describes it,
was one of the most memorable trips of his career — no small
claim for someone who has regularly spent time in the
Caribbean, South and Central America, Africa, and the Pacific.
Sandy’s master’s thesis was a comparative study of unisexual and
sexually-reproducing species of Cnemidophorus (Whiptail Lizards)
in the Santa Rita Mountains of southern Arizona.

Upon completion of his master’s research in 1963, Sandy
moved back to the Midwest, but to Kansas this time, to begin his
doctoral research with the eminent herpetologist, Dr. William
Duellman, at the University of Kansas. Duellman’s interests at
that point were in Central America and México, and he was in
the midst of collecting data for his monograph on the hylid frogs
of Middle America. This provided Sandy with the perfect oppor-
tunity to begin his own research in Central America — and he
jumped at the chance. Interested in studying geographic varia-
tion throughout the region and using the lizard genus Ameiva as

P R O F I L E

Sandy Echternacht: 
A Lifetime of Herpetology

Stesha A. Pasachnik1

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

PROFILE

A one-year-old Sandy and his mother near the Grand Canyon in 1940.
Near here, he snatched a snake out of the hands of a park ranger and
thereby, according to his mother, became hooked on reptiles. He
appears to have weighed about the same then as he does now.
Photograph courtesy of Arthur P. Echternacht.

1 Written with input from Todd Campbell, William Duellman, Glenn
Gerber, Rachel Goodman, and Justin Walguarnary.

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140 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 PASACHNIK

Sandy dwarfed by logs at a “green” logging operation near Itacoatiara, Amazonas, Brazil (ca. 160 km east of Manaus on the northern bank of the
Rio Amazonas).

Sandy and shy new friend in Makokou, Gabon, equatorial West Africa, March 1982.

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a study group, Sandy devoted more than a year reviewing all
available museum specimens.

While at Kansas, Sandy held a teaching assistantship in the
Department of Zoology and took an array of courses in the
department. He also became closely associated with other grad-
uate students in the Division of Herpetology in the Museum of
Natural History where he had an office. Among those students
were several who were working on some aspect of Neotropical
herpetology, namely John D. Lynch, Charles W. Myers, and
Linda Trueb. Sandy and John Lynch were the “bad boys” in the
division, and usually were responsible for various pranks, such as
littering the professor’s office with innumerable Coke cans and
“filing” cut-outs of Playboy nudes throughout Duellman’s 3 x 5
card catalog of his reprints.

In the summer of 1965, Sandy piled equipment and survival
necessities into a VW bus and headed out of Lawrence, Kansas,
with the goal of reaching Panamá while collecting and seeing as
much as possible along the way. As Sandy tells it, the two most
important pieces of equipment on this trip were a five-gallon
bucket for pickling and a bag full of rubber bands (Sandy has a
well-deserved reputation, among all who know him, as a crack
shot with a rubber band). During the following summer, Sandy
collected at remote sites along the Caribbean coast of Honduras
and Nicaragua, and on several off-shore islands. His last fieldwork
on Ameiva was with Duellman and Richard Montanucci in
Ecuador in 1971.

After completing his dissertation research, Dr. Arthur C.
Echternacht (“Only my mother and telemarketers call me
‘Arthur’,” claims Sandy) joined the faculty of Boston University and
soon thereafter became a Research Associate at Harvard. Then, on
Columbus Day in 1973, a friend from the University of Tennessee

IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 141PROFILE

Near Makokou, Sandy tried to become familiar with the objects of his
interest, communing closely with an unidentified chameleon.

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Sandy processing the fruits of his labors in Loja, Ecuador in 1971.

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called to inform him of a job opening there. He applied and was
offered the position on a Friday, but on Monday was notified that
the funding for the position had disappeared. Two years later, he
was offered another job with the University of Tennessee without
even applying. Sandy accepted the position in the Department of
Zoology, ascended the ranks to full Professor, and served as depart-
ment head for 13 years. Today, 31 years and countless graduate stu-
dents later, Sandy continues to be an active member of the depart-
ment, now called Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Sandy had his first experience with Rock Iguanas (genus
Cyclura) on Grand Cayman in the late 1980s, while vacationing
on Little Cayman Island. “I was really entranced by Cyclura
nubila caymanensis because they were very abundant and out in
the open.” Sandy took several “vacations” to Little Cayman after
that, including one on which he suffered a compound fracture of
his ankle while exploring the jagged karst interior on his own. As
the story goes, Sandy found two empty Coca Cola bottles (no
Pepsi for this man!) to protect his hands from the jagged rocks,
and using these dragged himself through the karst and thick
underbrush to the edge of Booby Pond. From there he hollered
for help, eventually attracting the attention of a local, and was
carried out of the bush on a board and taken by boat to Cayman
Brac, where he received medical attention. Despite this experi-

ence — or perhaps because of it, Sandy’s enthusiasm for Cyclura
continued to grow.

While he and Glenn Gerber were working on Glenn’s dis-
sertation research on the interactions between Grand Cayman’s
endemic anole (Anolis conspersus) and the introduced Cuban
Brown Anole (A. sagrei), Sandy took Glenn to Little Cayman to
take a look at the Cyclura. Glenn was equally entranced and, with
Sandy’s encouragement, initiated a year-long autecological study
of the iguanas on Little Cayman. He has since gone on to inves-
tigate other Caribbean iguanas.

During the course of research trips to Grand Cayman,
Sandy met Fred Burton (at that time working for the Mosquito
Research and Control Unit and helping to establish the Cayman
Islands National Trust). Fred was initiating a captive-breeding
program for the critically endangered Grand Cayman Blue
Iguana, Cyclura nubila lewisi (now C. lewisi). Sandy, of course,
found these lizards fascinating. He and Fred arranged for Bridget
Donaldson, who had just completed her Master’s degree work-
ing with Sandy on box turtle ecology, to initiate a radio-teleme-
try study of C. lewisi. By then, Fred had quit his job at the
National Trust and had founded the Blue Iguana Recovery
Program. Sandy’s student Rachel Goodman expanded this work
with a Master’s project that examined the home ranges, behavior,
activity patterns, and diet of these iguanas in a protected botanic
park on Grand Cayman. Sandy also is active in iguana conserva-
tion efforts through his involvement with the International
Reptile Conservation Foundation, where he serves on the edito-
rial board, the International Iguana Society, where he served as
Treasurer for two years, and by being a member of the IUCN
Iguana Specialist Group.

In the past few years, Sandy’s interests in iguanids have again
been sparked after a trip to the small island of Utila, which is
located just off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. This island has
been of interest to herpetologists for some time, in large part
because it is home to the threatened iguana, Ctenosaura bakeri.
This island endemic with a very narrow distribution is faced with
the all-too common threats of habitat destruction and over-har-
vesting. However, it is also faced with the threat of extinction by
hybridization with its more widely ranging congener, C. similis.
The most recent addition to the Echternacht lab, Stesha

142 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 PASACHNIK

Sandy with AJ Gutman and Ctenosaura bakeri at the International
Iguana Society (IIS) meeting on Isla de Utila, Honduras in 1999.

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Adult male Little Cayman Rock Iguanas (Cyclura nubila caymanensis)
are often quite approachable, especially if baited, during the breeding
season. In dense thorn scrub forest, the most efficient way to catch them
is just to (carefully) pile on.

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 143PROFILE

Pasachnik, has begun to investigate the degree and direction of
this hybridization using a slew of molecular markers. A small-
scale phylogeny of the C. melanosterna clade, the Honduran type
series of which was collected by Sandy during one of his early
trips through Central America, will also be constructed in hopes
of elucidating the colonization events that led to the speciation
we see in the Bay Islands today. 

In addition to his work with iguanas, Sandy and his students
(Mark Wilson, Dan MacDonald, Ed Michaud, Jim Minesky,
David Bishop, and Rachel Goodman) have for almost 20 years

been studying the natural history of the Green Anole, Anolis car-
olinensis, in the southeastern United States, including latitudinal
aspects of body size, reproduction, and genetics and long-term
studies of thermoregulation in several populations living on south-
facing cliffs in Tennessee, near the northern range limit of this
species. As a logical extension of his expertise with this species, he
is also studying the “natural” history of Green Anoles where they
have been introduced on islands in the South Pacific. Since the
late 1980s, he and his students have been investigating the intro-
duced Cuban Brown Anole, A. sagrei, in the southeastern U.S.

Sandy and Rachel Goodman on Grand Cayman in 2001.

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Sandy plying the tools of his trade, noosing a lizard on a spoils island in the Florida Intracoastal Waterway.

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This line of inquiry has attracted the interest and efforts of nearly
a dozen graduate students, the work of whom has spanned levels
of investigation from physiology and morphology through behav-
ior and reproduction to population dynamics. Early efforts to sub-
stantiate anecdotal reports of Green Anole declines following
Brown Anole invasion and to implicate direct interspecific male-
male aggression in these territorial animals produced surprising
results that suggested simple answers would be inadequate in
explaining the interaction. Subsequent research included outdoor
enclosure experiments with students Glenn Gerber, Todd Vincent,
and Justin Walguarnary. An experimental manipulation with stu-
dent Todd Campbell of whole populations of Green and Brown
anoles on dredge spoil islands in the Florida Intracoastal Waterway
to simulate invasions has clarified a pattern in which niche parti-
tioning, reproductive interference, and even intraguild predation
have a combined negative effect on Green Anoles. Most recently,
Sandy and his student Nathan Turnbough have been investigat-
ing effects of Brown Anoles on food webs in an effort to explain
how these lizards might influence whole communities.

In the end, although Sandy has (for good reason) focused
his attention mainly on lizards, his work has made significant
contributions to many fields of biology. Powered mainly by
Coca-Cola, fine pipe tobacco, and nearly inedible lunchtime
snacks, Sandy’s energy in the field is infectious, and his effect on
students, colleagues, and the general public has been lasting and
profound. We can only hope that his enthusiasm for the study of
basic natural history of all kinds of organisms has rubbed off on
the next generation of scientists.

144 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2006 PASACHNIK

Accustomed to the rigors of fieldwork, Sandy seeks a shaded retreat from which to record data on anoles on a spoils island in the Florida Intracoastal
Waterway.

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Accompanied by an inevitable Coca Cola, Sandy marks an anole on a
spoils island in the Florida Intracoastal Waterway.

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