BLACK IGUANAS

That's a  Black Iguana, CTENOSAURA SIMILIS,  above. In other places where I've lived with iguanas I never paid much attention to them because basically they just lay around in the sun digesting the miscellaneous stuff they'd eaten. This week they've been on my mind, however, because I've cleaned out the henhouse and begun trying to get our chickens civilized enough to provide us with a few eggs. The problem is that Black Iguanas eat both eggs and chicks. We'll just see how things work out between the iguanas, chickens and me.

We have three dogs here and they just love going after iguanas. A dog may scrape and scratch for half an hour at a crevice or hole where his nose tells him there's an iguana, but I've never seen a dog actually touch one.

What's funny is to see a dog with an iguana safely holed up someplace with just a bit of his tail showing. The thing is, that six inches of iguana tail could as well belong to a foot-long juvenile iguana as to a three-foot long, chicken-eating one. You'd be surprised how philosophical a dog's face becomes as the implications of that reality sink in.

PS: Later I saw dogs in other places attack and kill small to medium-size Black Iguanas. Also, Black Iguanas ate all my vegetable garden sowings as soon as they were an inch or so high..

An Excerpt from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter of November 1, 2005

IGUANAS EAT BANANA PEELINGS, DOGS EAT IGUANAS

Possibly we have even more Black Iguanas, CTENOSAURA SIMILIS, here than at my location last year, though the ones here tend to be smaller.

I eat a lot of bananas and the iguanas eat my peelings. I place the peelings atop a stone wall in the sunlight and it's seldom long until an iguana appears. At first meeting the iguana flicks the peeling with his red tongue, waits a few seconds, then takes a bite and waits a while longer, and finally takes several more bites. Typically the lizard gets part of the peeling into his mouth, then vigorously swings his head back and forth just like a chicken with something too big to swallow. With both chickens and iguanas, sometimes the shaken thing breaks, with a piece of manageable size remaining in the mouth. Also as with chickens, the greater part of the shaken thing gets slung beyond reach. The iguanas knock far more peelings off the wall than they eat.

It's not surprising that iguanas would sling their heads like chickens. In biological terms, there's not much difference between reptiles and birds. Birds are almost nothing more than the feathered evolutionary remains of little dinosaurs.

When a chicken poops, the white paste on the poop is mostly uric acid -- urine with the water removed for recycling in the bird's body. The other day I saw an iguana relieve himself and there was no white paste to it. What came out could have been fox poop, and plenty of liquid streamed over the rocks below.

Last year at Komchen the dogs chased iguanas but I never saw an igtuana get caught. Here iguanas regularly get caught and eaten. One dog, a German Shepherd, spends many afternoons barking interminably at a pile of rocks with an iguana inside it. Another, a little brown bitch with one drooping ear and big black teats, eyes an iguana-chasing situation and either attacks instantly or walks on, and if she attacks she often gets her iguana without a bark.

Different philosophies of life...

An Excerpt from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter of March 18, 2006

TWO MALE BLACK IGUANAS
BATTLE IT OUT

The instant I arrived at my favorite iguana-watching spot I knew I was in for a show. Atop two stone pillars inside the rubble zone of the old hurricane- collapsed henequen mill, not three feet apart, two yard-long male Black Iguanas, CTENOSAURA SIMILIS, perched glaring and head-lifting at one another. A head-lift consists of throwing the head so far back that the chin points skyward. Lasting for just a second or two it displays the throat, often black- speckled on a gray background, and two big throat pouches that make hormone-juiced-up males look like they have really bad cases of mumps.

One iguana was especially skinny so I named him Wiry, and the other was full-bodied but with a bloody red spot on his back so I called him Bloody. I figured that Wiry was the dominant male in the area and Bloody was a challenger. I've seen that dominant males spend so much time guarding their harem and fighting male interlopers that they don't eat enough and loose weight, so I figured that that was Wiry's story, and maybe Bloody's bloody spot resulted from losing an earlier fight.

After a few minutes Wiry couldn't stand it any longer, descended his pillar and clambered up Bloody's, and the battle began.

Each iguana went for the other's side just behind a front leg. Each seemed about to clamp down on a large section of the other's ribcage but, amazingly, neither bit. Both could have closed their jaws on the other but both held their mouths so wide open that the tips of their teeth hardly touched the other's skin. Instead, they kept maneuvering for better potential bites -- which meant that the pair slowly circled atop the pillar, like strategizing Sumo wrestlers angling for the right moment to strike. When the terrible bites did come they happened so fast that my mind didn't register anything other than that suddenly both had big mouthfuls of the other. Soon it became clear that the goal wasn't to bite into the other's side, but rather to grab the ridge of the back right behind the front shoulders -- where Bloody's bloody spot was.

They held onto one another for three or four minutes but then they came undone, and started it all over again. At the end of the next biting Bloody fell from atop the pillar, ignominiously right onto a lolling female. Wiry slowly descended, both head-lifted at one another like bowing Sumos, and another round ensued.

Three more circlings ending in bitings took place, Bloody getting the worst of it each time. Sometimes Wiry held Bloody with his belly skyward, his legs pawing at the air. Sometimes Wiry, clamped onto Bloody's nape, shook Bloody like a dog shaking a gopher to break its neck. During the last round Wiry could only get Bloody's leg in his mouth but that leg was shaken so violently that I'm sure I saw a large tear open behind Bloody's leg.

After about half an hour, with both iguanas smeared with blood -- mostly Bloody's blood -- Bloody staggered from the arena. He left defiantly head- lifting, but he staggered as he crawled away doing it, and as he pulled himself beneath a rock his defeat looked complete, and it was terrible to behold.

Wiry mounted his front end atop a rock and began a series of head-lifts so extravagantly triumphant that his chin passed the vertical mark, curving his body into a shallow C. Then I noticed the females.

From my perspective I could see eleven females around him and there must have been more. They were positioned so that Bloody could see their entire body lengths. It seemed to me that each female was posing in a way that conveyed this message, "Wiry, I have witnessed your triumph, and I confirm your supremacy." It was like a moment in a Wagnerian opera when lesser gods emerge from the mists eerily chanting glorifications to the higher god.

At the periphery of Wiry's circle of females also I saw four or five somewhat smaller males. They were all signaling with defiant head-lifts, and they were all staring exactly at Wiry.

Clearly, the opera had just begun.