As cold-stunned invasive iguanas fall from trees, Floridians scoop them up for killing

Ryan Izquierdo woke up on a recent morning groggy, cold and most of all ready — to go iguana hunting.

Temperatures in Jupiter, Fla., where the 27-year-old social media star lives, had dipped well below 50 degrees, as a cold front swallowed much of the East Coast in snowfall and record-breaking low temperatures. As flurries fell on parts of the state, residents braced for the inevitable: Cold-stunned green iguanas — one of Floridians’ most reviled invasive pests — began to lose consciousness and fall out of trees.

The dry, scaly deluge is a familiar forecast in those parts. These cold-blooded reptiles’ nervous systems shut down when temperatures dip into the 40s and below. They become paralyzed and fall from their leafy perches. This time, for some unlikely conservationists, as well as state officials, that meant killing season.

In a first, officials capitalized on the paralyzed pests and told residents they could bring them in for disposal.

“This is the first time we have organized a removal effort of invasive iguanas,” said Shannon Knowles, communications director for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

“South Florida has not experienced this level of cold weather in many years,” she added. “So we used this opportunity to remove this invasive non-native species from the landscape.”

The commission issued an executive order that allowed people without permits to gather and transport the iguanas to one of several offices to be humanely killed, “or, in some cases, transferred to permittees for live animal sales.”

Typically people can themselves humanely or painlessly do away with green iguanas when they see them, but they’re not allowed to transport them. Knowles added that people lined up, cloth bags and bins brimming with the lizards, to drop them off Sunday and Monday. While she said the commission did not yet have an official estimate, Izquierdo was floored by what he saw.

“It was a madhouse,” Izquierdo said of the FWC site near Fort Lauderdale where he deposited about 100 iguanas Monday. “There were iguanas that were pushing six to six-and-a-half feet long. They look like dragons, absolutely crazy.”

Green iguanas are a scourge of South Florida. First documented in the 1960s, their population has since exploded to, by some estimates, more than 1 million. They’ve wreaked havoc on the region’s infrastructure, burrowing holes around homes, sidewalks and seawalls. They’ve chewed through some of the state’s most crucial native plants such as nickerbean, which helps sustain the endangered Miami Blue butterfly.

Izquierdo has been catching iguanas since he was 10 years old. In his grandmother’s backyard, he found them to use as fishing bait for peacock bass.

“I’ve always loved nature and the outdoors,” he said.

Now, he makes a living out of it as a content creator, documenting his fishing excursions around the world. But as the dipping temperatures created a new opportunity last weekend, he decided to temporarily pivot to the quest he dubbed “a Florida man Easter egg hunt for dinosaurs.”

He jumped into his pickup truck and began hunting.

In warm temperatures, iguanas are almost impossible to nab. You need either a gun or a 15-foot-long pole with an invisible lasso attached to it, Izquierdo said.

“If you want to do iguana management, this is a good time to do it because they’re very vulnerable to removal,” said Frank Mazzotti, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Florida.

But in the cold, chase proved easy and bountiful. “This is the most I’ve ever found,” he said. “We were practically almost stepping on them.”

Despite the fun and viral Instagram reels, he’s not immune to the difficult decisions that come with maintaining a balanced ecosystem.

“They’re animals, so people do have a soft spot in their heart for them and so do I because they’re really cool, especially the little baby ones,” Izquierdo said. “But you have to look at the bigger picture of things.”

He’s passionate about making the most of a dead green iguana. On Monday night, he and his friends baked an iguana pizza, (delicious, he said, they’re nicknamed “chicken of the trees”) and he plans to use the skin and some meat for fishing lures and bait.

On Tuesday morning, as the temperatures in Florida finally began to creep up to milder levels, Izquierdo sat in his truck, filled with about a dozen stunned iguanas, knowing his hours of hunting were numbered.

“As the temperature starts climbing back up, it’s going to get back to normal,” he said. Two motionless lizards, a male and a female, lay in his lap. “Yeah, these iguanas will be back about their business.”