Quote Originally Posted by jwolfe152 View Post
ok wow i for some dumb *** reason i thought it was only state endangered not federally but i have not looked into it much so...but thanks for the info i know a little more than yesterday now
Nope. They're Federally listed. However, marcianus is on California's state threatened list. That's the main reason that garters are illegal to collect in Riverside County. There's only a small but stable population of checkered garters in California, in east Riverside county. They can only be found in an oasis/riparian zone habitat out there in the middle of the desert.

And Steve, this is what I was talking about. "The captive population, once thriving in the 1990's, went extinct in 2003 when the last remaining snake in captivity died at the San Francisco Zoo, where they were once considered the jewels of the collection." I do believe they are back at the zoo now and the snakes they have now were imported from the Netherlands. Genetically speaking they are useless for breed and release but for zoo specimens/education they are perfect since they can't collect them from the wild to be kept permanently in captivity. The snakes in Europe are descended from the same captive snakes that the zoo allowed to go extinct in 2003 and those are descended from legally collected (by the zoo) snakes before they went on the endangered list in the 1960's.. Feature Stories, San Francisco Garter Snake Returns To Its Namesake City