Symbio's conservation chief has had a wild rise

If you visited Symbio Wildlife Park 12 years ago, you might have seen Jarrad Prangell raking pathways or mowing the kangaroo lawns. Park maintenance was just the foot in the door a young conservationist needed, and Jarrad's work ethic has since propelled him to the top.

He's now an award-winning zookeeper, Symbio's head of conservation, mentor to First Nations students and proud alumnus of Macquarie University, graduating last year with a distinction in biodiversity and conservation.

All these achievements sprang from a childhood love of reptiles.

“I had a lot of animals when I was a kid,” Jarrad says. “At 13 years old, I got a bearded dragon. Before that, I was just playing with lizards in the backyard and catching snakes – and my mum was smacking me in the back of the head for picking things up.”

Soon after receiving his first pet reptile, Jarrad acquired another. “I got my first little diamond python, and then I just started collecting cool snakes and cool lizards. We kept two Murray River short-necks; that was fun.

“Then when I was 18, I started as a snake catcher, still living with my parents, and I had to rehab a lot of brown snakes and red-bellied black snakes, because a cat might have bit on them, or they might have got stuck in bird netting.

“So I was keeping a bunch of brown snakes and red bellies under my bed.”

These days, the 34-year-old has all the reptiles he needs at work – the only pet Jarrad and his wife, Christina, keep in their Port Kembla home is a rescue greyhound named Rosie.

Saving species behind the scenes

Jarrad has worked on three major species-saving programs at Symbio. Two are about threatened frogs – the green and golden bell frog and the southern Stuttering frog – and the third involves Bellinger River snapping turtles, critically endangered since a virus wiped out 90% of the population.

For the past eight years, Jarrad has been raising and breeding survivors in a special lab behind the scenes at Helensburgh's zoo. Hatching baby turtles has been the highlight of his career and, once they're big enough not to be snapped up by a catfish, he plans to return the “clean-up crew” to the river. 

“If anything dies in the river, from a mosquito to a wallaby," Jarrad explains, "turtles are going to come through and really clean that up, which is going to limit disease and toxins in the river."

The conservation projects have grown alongside Jarrad’s own career.

When he arrived at Symbio in 2013, the Radnidge family-owned zoo was on the verge of transformation. “All I remember was 'this space is great, I get to work with animals',” Jarrad says. “This is awesome, I could work here forever.”

He’d gone to university straight after school but, looking back, Jarrad says he didn’t have the mental space for studying. Instead, at age 20, he spent six months volunteering until general manager Matt Radnidge noticed his work ethic and offered him a job. The catch was Symbio already had a reptile keeper, so that job was in maintenance.

“I was like, 100% – whatever you need, I'll do it,” Jarrad says. “My first job here was really just rake the whole park, clean the park, make everything look beautiful. I did that for about a year and a half, and then I moved into projects – we built the cheetah exhibit and the lemurs and the cassowaries [exhibits]. We had a lot of fun building projects, and I learned a lot.”

After three years, the reptile role came up. Jarrad then ran the division for six years, picking up an Australasian Zookeeper of the Year award in 2018 before moving into Symbio’s conservation programs.

While he loves freshwater turtles, his favourite reptile is a venomous snake.

“I just love the red-bellied black snakes, I've been working with them for so long,” Jarrad says.

"They’re so misunderstood. People love to hate snakes, and the red-bellied black snake would have to be the most passive snake that we have. They just eat frogs and reptiles, and maybe they'll eat a mouse or two, if they're lucky.

“It's like my lifelong mission to try and educate the public on black snakes.”

While Jarrad has never been bitten by a venomous snake, almost every other kind of reptile has had a go.

“I work with a lot of reptiles, and I've been bitten by a lot of reptiles. That's because I prefer to use my hands and be a lot more gentle with them. But when it comes to venomous snakes, I'm pretty confident, I've been doing it for a while, and we train a lot of staff here, so we try to lead by example.”

City recognises achievements

Earlier this year, Jarrad won the sustainability and environmental achievement prize at the 2026 City of Wollongong Awards. It recognised his leadership in large-scale mapping projects and a First Nations mentorship program, where he taught young rangers how to fly thermal drones, record data, then work out the abundance of minority greater gliders or koalas in an area.

“It was lot of fun,” he says.

Next, Jarrad will be experimenting with "a great bit of tech" – the Hollowhog, a drill to speed up a tree's hollow-making process, which might otherwise take over 100 years. Again, this project will involve young people from the Illawarra Local Aboriginal Land Council. “They will be helping us with that project, selecting trees, doing some vegetation work, carving out the hollows, climbing the trees."

Awards all round

Symbio has won multiple Illawarra Business Awards. In 2025, the zoo's 50th anniversary year, the team won two prizes (outstanding visitor experience and excellence in sustainable tourism), while managing director Matt Radnidge was named outstanding business leader.

“I'm really proud of being zookeeper,” Jarrad says. 

“And I am so proud to work with Matt Radnidge. He puts every penny back into this place … he wants to future-proof what we're doing every step along the way. 

“The next couple of years are going to be very, very big, and none of it is taken lightly. He puts his heart and soul into everything he does, and he leads by example. We have come leaps and bounds, but I never felt like we were leaping and bounding until you look back and you realise you're very far away from where you used to be.”