Caiman spends night in police holding cell

A caiman - smaller cousins of the crocodile - spent the night at a Police Department precinct house after being captured Monday in Toa Baja.

The five-foot long reptile was snagged by personnel from the State Emergency Management Agency near the La Virgencita Bridge in the San José sector of Toa Baja on Monday night.
The caiman was then kept in a holding cell at the Toa Baja precinct house for nearly eight hours before it was picked up for processing by personnel from the Natural and Environmental Resources Department (DNER for its English initials)..

“There was no place to put it and since the bars are narrow we put it in the holding cell so it wouldn’t escape,” said Police Department spokeswoman Beatriz González.

The DNER took the captured caiman to its wildlife shelter in the Cambalache State Forest in Arecibo, according to police.

Caimans are not native to Puerto Rico but have been spotted in an increasingly wide area of the island. The crocodile-like caimans, from South America, were apparently exotic pets that were released into the wild in the 1960s, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and have been multiplying ever since.

They are often spurred out of rivers and swamplands like the Tortuguero Lagoon in Vega Baja by heavy rains and in recent years have been captured in pastureland and even the patios of homes along the north coast area from Arecibo to Toa Baja.

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