Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Read Free

Unwilling to euthanize what was a pet, the owner releases it in a patch of woods and hopes for the best.
    If this were to happen in New Jersey, say, that lizard or snake or other exotic animal would probably have an exciting summer before falling asleep on a cold day in October or November and never waking up. In a subtropical environment like Florida’s, an exotic pet from Africa or South America might very well live to reproduce.
    Initially, the iguanas were a novel delight to watch creeping around gardens, and they became a constant presence on every block of Boca Grande (the town in which we were hunting). In typical human fashion, most of the town’s residents decided this was a problem only when the iguanas actually began to devour their gardens. By the time I came to Gasparilla Island, many plants hadn’t flowered in years; the spiny-tails can easily climb even the tallest plants and eat the flower buds before they open. This problem prompted the town officials of Boca Grande to hire George. What he found when he started hunting the iguanas was something far more sinister than damage to ornamental plants.
    George, Jeff, and I drove a few blocks farther, occasionally slowing down as we passed empty vacation homes where George had permission to hunt iguanas. Even though it was legal to carry a pellet rifle and shoot iguanas, we tried to keep the gun out of sight: You never know when some tourist will overreact, call the police, and create a messy situation that wastes everyone’s time. We paused for a few minutes in front of a large yard to watch a pair of big males sunning themselves. George put a hand on his pellet rifle but didn’t shoulder it. Suddenly, one of the lizards leapt into the air at a shocking speed and grabbed what looked to be a small brown anole (a smaller species of lizard) off the side of a stump. That’s another thing about spiny-tailed iguanas: They hold the record as the fastest lizards on the planet.
    The electric cart squeaked to a stop in front of a broad empty lot, and Jeff and I hopped out. Jeff happened to be writing a story about George at the same time I’d arrived to go hunting with him. I suppose Jeff might have expected to spend a few days doing interviews and taking a few pictures, but the morning he walked through George’s front door, we hustled him out into the cart to come hunting with us.
    We approached a half-moon-shaped hole in the ground, and I noted the spiderwebs across the top of the hole, which, I surmised aloud, indicated that nothing large could be living there at the moment. As we looked around for the probable occupant of the hole, Jeff spotted a surprisingly large gopher tortoise staring at us from the dappled sunlight under a tree. The tortoise looked at each of us in turn, seemingly unafraid and already bored with us. (I suppose if you’ve been facing down big, black-and-gray lizards with teeth like those of a prehistoric crocodile for the last ten years, you’re not likely to be easily scared off.) After a minute, it ambled into the hole I’d insisted was uninhabited.
    In Florida, the native gopher tortoise is a keystone species — that is, a plant or animal that many other species depend on for survival. It happens to be a keystone for some three hundred other species. It digs holes up to forty feet long, in locations that don’t tend to cause erosion or environmental damage but that do provide homes for many other animals. There are also fruits, such as the gopher apple and the saw palmetto, that the gopher tortoise helps to reproduce. It spreads the seeds in its droppings, thus aiding propagation. The gopher tortoise tends to excrete seeds intact and ready to germinate more often than do many of the other animals that eat the same fruit.
    We saw many gopher tortoises during the three days I spent in Boca Grande, but none of them had a shell smaller than about seven or eight inches long. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why: The iguanas were eating