Tegu Lizards: Two Words – Lethal Removal
BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 10 months ago
They grow to four and a half feet long.
Tampa bay, Florida– Large, invasive lizards are taking over parts of Hillsborough County.
They are called Tegus and they are from South America but have made southwest Florida their new home …
Offner has spent the last three years catching tegus.
“They produce rapidly, laying between 25-50 eggs at a time,” said Offner. “They eat everything from plants to other animals with bones and shells- also amphibians, and birds.”
“We had a whole gopher turtle preserve on our 1,100 acres and now they are all gone,” said volunteer horse rescue worker, Marvel Stewart. “We see four to five a week on our property.”
Stewart lives in Lithia along with other homeowners who have been reported sightings of the four-foot long lizards.
“One got into our horse shed, and thankfully the horse was not in there at the time, but if it had been it would have been bad because the horse would have bucked, and possibly hurt herself trying to run from the lizard,” said Stewart.
The animals are native to Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina.
The FWC has set out 28 traps in the parkland and dozens more on private property to help catch them.
They lure the lizards in with a raw chicken egg and then trap them and humanely euthanize them.
They have no known predators according to the FWC.
Like all invasive species problems, this one can be solved rather easily. Call in the hunters, and tell people to carry weapons and shoot them on sight. But that would cause the police concerns because then the “only ones” wouldn’t have sole right to discharge weapons.
If you’re a Floridian with big snakes, lizards, bear, panther and other critters who can harm you and you don’t carry a gun, why not? As for the invasive species problem, Florida will continue to be overrun by all manner of animals because authorities don’t really want to solve the problem.
This problem is like feral hogs which are overrunning much of America, except the hog problem is much bigger, running some farmers out of business. There shouldn’t be any limit anywhere on time, manner, season, choice of weapon, with hunting license or not, on killing feral hogs.
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