This last option is made possible by staying up on current trends and anticipating where your field will lean to next. Taking one kind of punk option and turning your nose up at these areas will lead you away from the action into a non-trendy area. Picking fights in science can often lead to breakthrough work because the participants are usually highly motivated individuals. In addition to keeping up with the latest and greatest in herpetological science, people are a valuable source of information. Your more senior colleagues hanging around in your department might be able to give you some leads on what's interesting, as are people whom you've met at meetings.
Good science is about discovery.
It is often the case that discoveries can be made when conducting carefully controlled experiments in the lab aimed at teasing apart fine-grained hypotheses about universal phenomena. However, discovery in herpetology can often be as easy as stumbling on to cool weird stuff that herps do. You can find out about such potentially interesting phenomena by talking to naturalists. They can be found in old wings of your department, in amateur herp groups, in museums or reptile parks. Herpos hold vast amounts of unorganised information on herps in their heads and will gladly divulge it to you if you ask them about it.