Rafael Joglar, Professor, Department of Biology, University of Puerto Rico:

These guys are big. They can grow up to six feet long with their tails.

They’re beautiful, they’re gorgeous. Make no mistake they are really attractive. At least I feel that they are very attractive. 

Carlos Rodriguez, MS, Environmental Interpreter, “Para la Naturaleza”:

These animals are causing air traffic delays.

They’re eating crops and causing damage in general to infrastructure.

Rafael Joglar: 

Iguanas will nest very close to the road and they actually are making up to thirty different caves underneath the roads. So when there is a vehicle crossing the road with several passengers, the road will collapse.

Carlos Rodriguez:

That’s why they call it a green plague. And why is it a plague? Cause it’s an invasive species.

These guys came here through the pet trade. They’ve dispersed throughout the island.

Many factors are affecting their population distribution throughout Puerto Rico. First of all the climate. The climate here is very similar to Central and South America. Its a tropical climate. Warm temperatures year round. It has a defined dry and wet season. That creates patches of open land for the iguanas to nest. They can lay an average of thirty eggs per year, but it can  can be as many as 75 eggs per clutch per one female. That’s a lot.

Rafael Joglar: 

Out of a hundred eggs, ninety three of them will be successful and will hatch into a small iguana. 

Carlos Rodriguez:

Now in Central and South America you would have natural predators. Fifty two to be exact. 

Here in Puerto Rico, we haven’t had an iguana species living on the island for more than five hundred years. So that means that green iguanas are unhindered. They have a lot of vegetation to eat, a lot of land to nest in and very few predator pressures.

Rafael Joglar:

They were here for over forty years and nobody noticed them. And then all of a sudden they became very common, very abundant and they started to interact with people and interact with our ecosystems here in Puerto Rico. 

And they have become a problem for our economy.

Carlos Rodriguez:

So we need a little bit of help. What we are doing here at las Cabezas de San Juan with harvesting eggs, getting rid of the eggs, has been very helpful. We’ve eliminated since the year 2008 to the present approximately 13,000 eggs from the population. That’s a big number, but this is something that we are going to have to do for the next 15 maybe 20 years.

Rafael Joglar:

Now it has evolved and we have people from the community of this area working as volunteers in that project.

Carlos Rodriguez:


If you look up Green Iguanas in Panama or Costa Rica they’re actually protected by law. They’re almost an endangered species. Here in Puerto Rico we have the opposite problem, we have too many Iguanas.

Carlos Rodriguez:

4 Million Iguanas in Puerto Rico. One Iguana per person in Puerto Rico. So we have to explore many different techniques to mitigate this problem. Egg harvesting, hunting where ever it is possible and turning it into a menu.