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Iguanas infest isle in 'ecosystem gone crazy'

The run-amok lizards are taxing Boca Grande residents' patience, and soon, likely, their pocketbooks.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 14, 2006

BOCA GRANDE - Death and taxes may be life's only certainties, but for folks in this upscale island town, add iguanas. And another tax.

In three decades, the Gulf Coast resort community has been overrun by the black, spiny-tailed, nonnative lizards that demolish gardens, nest in attics and weaken beach dunes with burrows.

Last month, Lee County commissioners agreed to create a special tax for Boca Grande to cover costs of studying the infestation on the barrier island of Gasparilla, where scientists estimate there are up to 12,000 iguanas on the loose, more than 10 per year-round resident.

Bonnie McGee keeps a pellet gun by her door ready to take on the slithering enemy.

"They eat your flowers and their feces is everywhere," she said, adding that she has killed dozens. "Some people toss them in the canal and the hermit crabs feed on them."

Aaron Diaz, owner of Boca Grande's Barnichol hardware store, said he has sold 75 traps in the past three weeks.

"For some people, they've really taken over, climbing into attics, into vents and even into their toilets," he said.

County Commissioner Bob Janes doesn't know how much eradication will cost yet, so he's not sure how much the tax will be. He said the issue has finally come to a head.

"In 1988, there was talk of a program, but people at that time thought they were kind of cute," Janes said. "They're no longer cute little guys. They're very pesky. They eat turtle and bird eggs and burrow into sand dunes. We could lose a lot of sand in a storm."

Kevin Enge, an exotic species expert with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, thinks the iguana was introduced to Boca Grande in the 1970s by a boat captain who brought a few from Mexico for his kids but released them when they got too big. Their population exploded - a female can lay up to 75 eggs a year.

The reptiles are found in a few other places in Florida, but nowhere in the numbers seen on Gasparilla Island, home to television renovator Bob Vila and a vacation spot for the Bush clan.

"There's no way you'll get rid of them all. Once they're established to that extent, it's a lost cause," Enge said.

The county hired Florida Gulf Coast University biologist Jerry Jackson to study the problem. He is worried that the lizards, besides being a nuisance, are destroying native habitat, spreading other invasive species through their droppings and endangering the town.

"The majority of their burrows are in the dunes along the beaches," Jackson said. "... The dunes are in danger of just disappearing with a storm surge."

The iguanas feed on the eggs of gopher tortoises, a species of "special concern" that the state says will likely be relisted as threatened in a few months.

The lizards also carry salmonella, a disease organism that's a threat to both humans and native species, Jackson said. "It's a zoo out there. It's an ecosystem gone crazy."

[Last modified April 14, 2006, 01:55:46]