- The Plate
What to Do With Puerto Rico’s Invasive Iguanas? Eat Them
When video producers Jean-Paul Polo and Isabel Perez Loehmann were growing up in Puerto Rico in the 1980s, they remember the constant presence of big green iguanas strutting around, chomping on leaves, and getting underfoot. They had no idea they used to be pets, or that the iguanas were destroying the island’s crops and busting up asphalt by burrowing under roadways.
In fact, for the last several decades, green iguanas have been the island’s most notorious pests, eating their way through fields of farmland and repopulating like crazy. Think of them as the lionfish of the land (see Man v. Lionfish). Polo and Perez Loehmann discovered when researching the National Geographic video below that Puerto Rico is welcoming bands of hunters who will come and voluntarily shoot the pesky critters by the dozens to get them off your farm.”We are eliminating a plague,”