by Craig Pittman, 12/5/17, Tampa Bay Times
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Lt. Scott Mullin
removed an iguana from a woman's toilet in Kendall outside of Miami in May.
[Miami-Dade Fire Rescue via the Miami Herald]
Iguanas are commonly found in Mexico, Central
America, South America, and the Caribbean. In 2017, you could add "Florida
toilets" to that list.
So far this year, news stories reported that
iguanas have turned up in Florida commodes at least five times — although
there’s reason to believe it’s happened more often than that.
What are they doing in the toilet? Besides
the backstroke, that is? Trying to get out.
Although other animals have been known to
intrude into toilets — rats, for instance — iguanas are perfectly adapted for
plumbing infiltration. The voracious little Godzillas, which can grow to be 6
feet long from snout to tail, frequently climb trees, and also tend to be good
swimmers, able to hold their breath for an extended time period.
From the trees "they come down from the
vent pipe in the roof," explained veteran Boca Grande iguana trapper
George Cera, who has written a cookbook called, "Save Florida, Eat an
Iguana." "Even if your vent pipe is closed, that doesn’t mean your
neighbors’ is.”
Once an iguana gets into someone’s plumbing,
it can quickly wind up swimming in the sewer system, he explained. Then it’s
looking for a way to escape.
"It’s the luck of the draw where they
come out," he said. "The next place place to pop out is your 3-inch
toilet pipe.”
In other words, while New York’s sewers may not
be filled with alligators, as the legend has it, Florida’s sewers do apparently
team with toothy green iguanas that frequently pop up in the pooper.
Among the many perils that Floridians
regularly confront — the state gets more hurricanes, lightning strikes,
sinkholes and shark bites than anywhere else in the U.S. — finding an iguana in
the toilet is unique. Not only does it happen more in Florida, but a
Lexis-Nexis search of news stories from around the nation reveals that it
happens only in Florida.
This year is not the first time an iguana has
turned up in a Florida toilet. For instance, in 2015, a woman in Fort
Lauderdale called Roto-Rooter to clear a clogged commode, only to hear the
plumber scream upon yanking out an iguana. It died — the iguana, that is, not
the plumber.
But this is the year when reports of iguanas
in toilets repeatedly hit the news.
The most recent toilet iguana to make news
happened in Hialeah on Nov. 30. A man named Giovanni Profera told Telemundo
last week, "I sat down, I felt pressure, I jumped and saw a lizard."
The iguana scrambled out of the bowl and
fled, no one knows where. Meanwhile, Profera said he’s now terrified of using
the bathroom.
Also last month, a women in Palmetto, in
Manatee County, was going to clean her toilet but freaked out when she
discovered an iguana swimming in the bowl. She has been afraid of lizards since
she was five.
"I didn’t know what it was at first, so
I instantly screamed and my 9-year-old daughter come running in and she said,
‘Mommy what is it?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ " Dani Craven told
WFLA-TV. "All I could see were scaly, like a scaly tail. I couldn’t tell
if it was an alligator or a lizard. I didn’t know.”
Her husband wasn’t home and she wasn’t about
to tackle it alone. She put out a cry for help on Facebook and a neighbor came
over armed with rubber gloves, a net and a cooler. The neighbor caught the
creature, even though it kept hissing at her. She took it to a wildlife rehabilitation
facility.
In August, a man in the South Florida
community of Medley was trying to unclog a toilet when he looked down the drain
pipe and saw an iguana peering up at him. The man’s uncle calmly caught it with
a loop of rope, then walked it outside as if it were on a leash and turned it
loose, which means it can go invade someone else’s toilet.
In July, Univision reporter David Adams, a
former Times Miami bureau chief who lives in Key Biscayne, donned ski gloves, a
gas mask and a bulletproof vest to remove an iguana from his toilet. He
captured it by wrapping it in a beach towel. He, too, chose to release the
lizard back into the wild.
"He hissed at me and had a couple of jaw
snaps, but then scampered away to rejoin the reptilian hordes in our neighborhood,"
Adams wrote in a Facebook post about the encounter.
In May something similar happened in the
Miami suburb of Kendall. A woman lifted the lid of her commode, spotted the
iguana, closed the lid and dialed 911. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s "Venom Unit"
— which routinely handles calls involving pythons and other snakes — captured
the critter, and afterward said it was a first for them. They took it to a
wildlife rescue center.
Florida is infested with more exotic and
invasive species than any other state, with the roster ranging from feral hogs
originally imported by Spanish conquistadors to giant African land snails
smuggled in a few years ago by a religious cult.
Pythons are the best known, although they are
largely confined to the Everglades, but iguanas are among those that have
spread the most widely across the state. They devour sea turtle eggs and
shorebird nestlings, and leave behind feces that may carry salmonella bacteria,
which can cause food poisoning, typhoid fever and other ailments.
The earliest official report of iguanas
roaming the Florida wild dates back to Miami-Dade County in 1965, according to
Sarah Lessard, a spokeswoman for the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission. Now they are found all along the Atlantic coast from Martin County
down to the Keys and in isolated instances have been found on the state’s west
coast as well.
The next official sighting, from 1979, came
from the island community of Boca Grande, near Fort Myers. Local legend says a
Boca Grande resident brought a pair back from Mexico as pets, then either
turned them loose or lost them, and they became the Adam and Eve of a huge
Florida iguana colony.
By 2007 the island was overrun by thousands
of the lively lizards. Finally Lee County assessed a tax to pay for a trapper,
making it the only place in America with an iguana tax. In just his first two
years on the job, Cera, the trapper, caught 16,000 iguanas. As of last year he
was still averaging about 2,000 captures a year.
A similar drop has occurred in reports of
iguanas in Boca Grande’s toilets, Cera said — but it has never entirely
stopped.
"Back when the population on the island
was larger, it would happen two or three times a month," he said.
"Now it’s maybe one or two times a year." None of those incidents
made the news, suggesting that there are some iguanas that, like a politician
facing indictment, manage to find a way to slip past reporters.
Cera, whose cookbook includes recipes for
such delicacies as iguana tacos, said the frequency of iguana toilet sightings
has made him wonder what sort of animals routinely pop up at Florida’s sewer
plants.
Bill Logan, the spokesman for St.
Petersburg’s public works department, said city officials are unaware of any
iguanas appearing in the city’s sewer system. But two years ago, he said,
workers shutting down the old Albert Whitted sewer plant caught an 18-inch-long
Australian catfish swimming in the aerators. They figured someone had flushed
the fish when it was smaller and it just kept growing.
Nobody, he said, was brave enough to eat it.
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