Florida Turns Cold Snap Into a Huge Iguana Culling Drive

When the thermometer plunged in South Florida, residents didn't just pull on sweaters—they grabbed bags and went lizard hunting. A rare cold snap recently sent temperatures into the 40s in the Sunshine State, triggering a somewhat familiar local sight: Green iguanas, stunned by the chill, lost control of their muscles and plummeted from trees. "It was kind of the perfect storm to really knock them out of the trees and create this crazy phenomenon we haven't seen in a very, very long time," a local pest control worker tells the Sun Sentinel. Florida wildlife officials have moved quickly, however, to turn the reptilian rain into an organized removal effort, temporarily allowing anyone, permit or not, to collect and transport the invasive species to state offices to be euthanized or transferred for legal live-animal sales, reports the Washington Post.

In warmer weather, iguanas are agile and hard to catch; in this cold, one wildlife ecologist called it an ideal moment for "iguana management." "This is the first time we have organized a removal effort of invasive iguanas," says Shannon Knowles of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which reported lines of people arriving with bins and cloth sacks full of immobilized reptiles. Content creator Ryan Izquierdo said the Fort Lauderdale-area drop-off location was "a madhouse" as he unloaded roughly 100 lizards himself.

Green iguanas, first seen in South Florida in the 1960s, now number an estimated million-plus and are blamed for snacking their way through native vegetation and undermining seawalls, sidewalks, and home foundations. State rules normally allow people to kill them humanely on private property but not to transport them, a restriction that this new order has temporarily eased.

Izquierdo, who once used iguanas as fishing bait and now films his outdoor pursuits for a living, leaned into the unusual endeavor, dubbing it "a Florida man Easter egg hunt for dinosaurs." He says he tries to use as much of each animal as possible—turning meat into "chicken of the trees" pizza and saving skins for fishing lures—even as he acknowledges the cold reality: Once the temperatures rebound, so will the iguanas. The AP notes, however, that although "they usually wake when temperatures warm, the reptiles can die after more than a day of extreme cold."