That was just the first of many. Today Denny, who turns 15 in December, devotes two rooms in the Montara home he shares with Realtor parents David Cline and Diana Plank: one for breeding them and the other to house his favorites.
His reptilian repertoire includes red-tail boas as breeders, three smaller ball pythons and a corn snake.
  
(Use arrows above to view more photos) |
His mother wasn’t squeamish that her son turned their home into a domestic version of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” (in which snakes in a jet’s cargo hold get loose and menace travelers).
“I like snakes,” she said airily. “My wedding ring has a serpent on it” and she recalled how in some Native American theologies, snakes are messengers to the gods.
Far from shunning things that slither, son and mother turned them into a paSSSSSion. This summer they spent two weeks in the Cayman Islands as volunteers with the Blue Iguana Recovery Program.
A blue iguana can grow to 25 pounds and 5 to 6 feet in length, live 40 to 60 years, and is named for the cobalt tint its brownish, leathery skin typically takes on when attracting mates.
The program is the brainchild of biologist Fred Burton, who visited the Cayman Islands in 2000 to count the blue iguana population. Once there were hundreds, but Burton counted just 20, enough to render the species virtually extinct, a population decimated by dogs and cats, and green iguanas that competed for food, introduced by humans.
Burton set out to restore that population to 1,500.
The program occupies a facility outside the 65-acre Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Gardens, set aside, Diana Plank said, by the islands’ government at the request of its National Trust to re-establish species threatened by extinction.
The Planks visited a reptile show in South San Francisco in April and met a member of the International Reptile Conservation Foundation, affiliated with the iguana recovery program. They consulted the Internet about the program and volunteer opportunities.
It didn’t take long to decide the question. “Getting to essentially save a species is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” said Denny Plank, who maintains an online pen-pal correspondence with biologist Dr. Brady Barr.
“The opportunity to go to the island and help with the endangered species was catnip for Denny,” said his mother.
The trust loaned mother and son a beachfront apartment and a car for their July 16 - Aug. 15 stay.
Their tasks of feeding and monitoring the iguanas seemed simple at first. Every day they gathered five, 5-pound buckets of greenery including morning glories and yellow root, which they chopped and prepared in handful-sized portions for baby iguanas and full-meal-salad-sizes for bigger ones.
They monitored baseball-size iguana eggs in a vermiculite mixture, handling them carefully since replacing the eggs at the wrong angle could kill the babies inside.
The “hatchling” iguanas were regularly weighed, tagged with lifelong identification numbers and tended carefully for their first couple of years. Then they were placed into fenced areas as “free roamers,” GPS microchipped, and finally released into the wild.
But volunteers performed these tasks in 110-degree temperatures with 95 percent humidity. Besides that, Denny Plank is allergic to the yellow root. Exposure to it gives him rashes. And that wasn’t its only downside.
It is, Diana Plank said, a derivative of the noni plant, potato-like in appearance and rich in antioxidants, but it “smells like a combination of a dirty cat box and bleu cheese. People will drink that — and iguanas love it.”
And Denny Plank loves them. For him, reptiles are not the scary, soulless denizens of pulp fiction.
“I think a lot of people don’t see how developed their brains actually are,” he said. “I realized how different their personalities can be.”
He cited how one of his snakes loves to curl up around his right wrist but hates to be on his left hand, and he doesn’t know why. He describes his red-tail boas as “nice, docile,” nonaggressive snakes. They include “Lucky,” so named because he “gets to get lucky and be a breeder.”
A freshman at Half Moon Bay High School, Denny Plank will receive community service credit for his work with the iguanas. The minimum number of service hours is 30; he clocked 60 in the islands.
His mother loved it, too.
“It was profound on a number of different levels,” she said. “To be involved in close proximity with an animal that close to extinction, knowing that without a lot of volunteer help, government help, it may not make it, to hopefully assure that it will.”
As a mother, she said, she found that “it really was incredible and blessed, for the opportunity to experience this part of (Denny’s) passion, to spend that kind of time with him.”
Her son shared the thrill, especially when he saw the iguana population make strides before his eyes. “We witnessed the blue iguana, the most endangered iguana on earth; we watched them grow in population about 33 percent.”
w