About HerpCo

HerpCo - The Herpetological Company

After 3 years of planning and running expeditions around the world, HerpCo Limited was founded in 2017. Every trip is planned and executed using a data-driven and species-centric approach, allowing us to accurately focus on achieving the goals of the trip. These goals are often to find rare target species of reptiles and amphibians.

Together with the expedition participants, trip-reports and even scientific publications can be published. To date, our expeditions have yielded 3 published papers and 1 further article is in-preparation.

About the founder

HerpCo Limited founder and director Anthony Plettenberg Laing

Anthony Plettenberg Laing is the founder and director of HerpCo Limited. With a lifelong passion for wildlife and after 6 years of keeping up to 18 species of reptiles and amphibians at home, Anthony decided to enrol at Bangor University to study Zoology with Herpetology.

During his undergraduate degree, his research interests developed to primarily focus on phylogenetics, systematics & taxonomy and population genetics. These research interests influenced the projects he worked on, the first of which was a genetics study on putative non-native grass snakes in the UK.

After obtaining his bachelor’s degree he continued at Bangor University with a research masters (MScRes) in molecular biology. The outcome of this project was the development of a new multi-locus phylogeny of the cobra clade elapids. This phylogenetic tree is the framework used in a paper currently under-review by the journal Science.

Now, Anthony uses his scientific background and strong analytical-reasoning skills commercially whilst working on consulting projects for various start-ups. He continues to run HerpCo part-time, offering multiple expeditions a year.