Why This Invasive Lizard Is Bad for Puerto Rico
July 10, 2015 - Over the past few years, Puerto Rico has been dealing with an exploding iguana population. Originally brought to the island as pets, the lizards now outnumber people and are wreaking havoc on agriculture, infrastructure, and even air traffic, causing millions of dollars in damages. Since the reptiles have no natural predators in Puerto Rico to control the population, conservationists are seeking alternative ways of combating the problem.
Click here to learn more about green iguanas.
Transcript
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.