Los Angeles Zoo’s new reptile house to open

The Los Angeles Zoo is opening a snazzy new home for reptiles and amphibians today, a $14-million condominium complex for Mexican beaded lizards, Rowley’s palm vipers, radiated tortoises and other creatures that slither and croak.

The LAIR — the acronym for Living Amphibians, Invertebrates and Reptiles — was five years in the making and will be one of just a few reptile houses to open in North America in the last decade.

“We’ve got one of the best in the nation,” zoo Director John Lewis said as workers prepared by cleaning display windows, planting feathery ferns, adjusting temperature and humidity controls and using metal hooks to place venomous snakes carefully into their spacious new homes.

PHOTOS: Snazzy new home for reptiles

LAIR will house 49 exhibits and 60 species. That is fewer than lived in the old reptile house, “but we’ll do a better job in terms of meeting the needs of the animals, producing breeding stock and showing them off to the public,” Lewis said. The old reptile house had well over 100 species on display in its heyday, but many were housed in small aquarium settings.

The zoo estimates that 1.6 million visitors will walk through LAIR each year over the next 30 years.

The zoo is launching an advertising blitz to accompany the opening. Television commercials will feature rock musician Slash and 90-year-old actress Betty White, who will be seen marveling over a pair of prehistoric-looking Mexican giant horned lizards.

“Gorgeous,” White says.

“Weird,” says a lizard staring back at her.

By week’s end, splashy images of rainbow-hued Fiji Island banded iguanas will be popping up on billboards and bus sides across the county, many of them accompanied by pithy phrases such as “Can’t talk now. Basking.”

The $500,000-advertising campaign will target an audience that has been missing at the zoo since the former reptile house was demolished five years ago: families and children fascinated by frogs and snakes. The reptiles had been housed out of public view awaiting construction of their new digs.

Lions, tigers and bears will always be favorites; but Slash, a lifelong patron of the zoo and aficionado of venomous snakes, expects the LAIR to become a popular attraction. “Natural curiosity and fear of reptiles has always made them fascinating creatures,” he said in an interview. “But people are really going to dig this place because of its natural settings and roomier exhibits.”

The fast, slender and deadly green mamba snake is amazing, he said.

Overall, the collection reflects the diversity of the city served by the 46-year-old municipal zoo. The dozens of rattlesnakes and vipers on display, for example, come from Armenia, China, Africa, Central and South America, the Southwestern deserts of the United States and the northwestern deserts of Mexico.

“We went for quality and relevance instead of quantity — and each of our species has a powerful story to tell,” said Ian Recchio, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the zoo. “My philosophy is that folks should be able to see animals that come from the wilds of their homelands.”

Many of the species on display are nearing extinction because of habitat loss, wildfires, hunting and a rare-animal trafficking trade that spans the globe.

LAIR tenants include a 3-foot-long Chinese giant salamander, the world’s largest amphibian. The species has lost 80% of its habitat since the 1950s.

The largest animal in residence is the false gharial, an endangered species of crocodile native to Southeast Asia that grows up to 15 feet in length.

Then there are the four Gray’s monitors, a large lizard species native to the Philippines and once thought to be extinct. The zoo acquired the monitors after authorities busted a smuggling ring. “We have no idea where these individuals originated, but they are going to be pretty happy here,” Recchio said, as the lizards flicked their fork-like tongues and explored the trees and boulders of one of the facility’s largest displays.

louis.sahagun@latimes.com