As if the latest reports of Burmese pythons, monitor lizards and Cuban tree frogs crawling around Florida were not enough, a disruptive new invader has arrived.
It’s an exotic lizard called a tegu, a 4-foot-long reptile from Argentina with sharp claws and a voracious appetite for meat that could possibly upset the ecological applecart. One was spotted last week in the Ocala National Forest, a place teeming with campers, swimmers and hikers.
Forest officials said the black-and-white lizard was probably dropped off in the forest by an overwhelmed pet owner.
“We’re taking this very seriously,” said Carrie Sekerak, a forest-wildlife biologist. “A tegu is known to go inside gopher-tortoise burrows and dig out mice and tortoise eggs…. It can tip the balance suddenly.”
Common in South America, tegus are one of the most abundant lizards in southern Brazil. The leather-skinned creatures have been harvested for their skins and meat in Paraguay and Argentina. They also have been used to control rat populations.
Tegus are omnivorous and have a taste for native plants and small rodents, which are food for Florida snakes and raptors.
“So they are taking away a food source for those animals,” Sekerak said.
In recent years, tegus have become popular with exotic-pet aficionados in the United States because of their usually docile nature. It’s not unusual for tegu owners to let their pets run free inside their homes, said Kevin Enge, a herpetologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“A lot of people watch television with them sitting on their laps,” Enge said.
The animals can bite, however, and will whip their tails if cornered.
Similar to other voracious exotic pets, tegus are now being released into the wild by pet owners who can no longer handle or feed them. And that’s likely how the tegu ended up in the Ocala forest. It was found by a group of state wildlife workers last month in a remote area more than three miles from the nearest home.
“It’s probably an animal that got too big, and somebody got tired of it, and they dumped it, figuring it was a big, beautiful area,” said Steve Johnson, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Florida, who puts together Invader Updater, an online newsletter about nonnative invasive fauna. “And it’s a scary thing because tegus are very opportunistic feeders, and it will compete with the native species.”
Not knowing what it was, one of the forest workers snapped a photo of the tegu and e-mailed it to Sekerak.
“I said: ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s a tegu!’ ” she said. Sekerak told the workers to kill it, but the tegu was too quick and ran off.
In 2006, state biologists found the first tegu in the wild in Florida. In the past few years, tegu breeding populations have been discovered in Miami-Dade County, the Everglades and western Polk County.
So far, the Ocala forest tegu is the first recorded sighting in Central Florida. Biologists fear there may be more.
Tegus’ penchant for eggs of the gopher-tortoise — a native Florida animal that already faces a number of dangers, including construction bulldozers — is particularly worrisome, Johnson said.
“It’s another insult on top of another insult” for the gopher tortoise, Johnson said. “It’s like removing a nut and a bolt from an engine. Maybe nothing would happen, but if you keep removing more nuts and bolts, eventually your car won’t run.”
Unlike many exotic animals, tegus can survive cold winters because they dig burrows and hibernate.
“It’s hard to say how many there are, but we’re going to keep our eyes open,” Enge said. “If we see others, then it may be time to start an eradication.”
Tegus join a long list of nonnative wildlife that have emerged in Florida, including armadillos, feral pigs, Burmese pythons, Cuban tree frogs, walking catfish, rainbow skinks and rhesus monkeys.
Sekerak often visits reptile and pet shows to check out the latest exotic animals people are buying, because those animals eventually could end up in the wild.
“Florida is being hit by so many invasive species that it seems there’s no way evolution will be able to keep up,” she said.