Threat of toilet lizards should send a chill

You know how I can tell it’s really a cold winter? Lizards. That’s right, lizards. Not blizzards. And they are dropping from the Florida trees like little green bean bags. With legs. And icky tails. This horrific story is being widely reported by world media, because, as the old saying in journalism goes, if it’s frozen lizards falling from trees, it leads.

And that is exactly what has been happening. In South Florida, temperatures have dipped so low this winter that it is having a serious impact on iguanas staying up in their tree-ness. Or, as Ron Magill, communications director for Zoo Miami said: “It’s raining iguanas.”

I feel like those words would be good candidates for the last words I ever hear.

Iguanas can grow to be two metres long (that’s six feet in Florida). They are kind of scary-looking mini-dinosaurs, even small ones. I haven’t encountered one for many years, but I recall attending a party in college and the host’s pet iguana got loose from its enclosure. It went on a rampage that at the time seemed like something out of a movie, but in retrospect was probably more like: Dozens of Panicked Party Goers: Ahh! Ahh! A lizard! It’s free! Ahh! Lizard: Ahh! Party Goers: Ahh! That fleeting encounter with a lizard doing its weird lizard run-walk through an apartment was enough to scare me sober. Almost.

So, to hear about frozen lizards falling from the sky and just lying there, stunned, is too much. And when they warm up, these lizards just pick up and go about their business.

The mental image of chilled lizards losing their grip and landing with a thud at poolside decks, bar patios or on car windshields is genuinely disturbing to those of us from northern climates.

But this is South Florida, where a rain of lizards is barely news. There are much larger headlines dominating the Florida news. For example, from November 2017, there was this headline out of Orlando: ‘Man accidentally shoots himself in road rage incident.’

I read one source referencing this incident but, as a responsible journalist, I had to find additional sources to confirm. After literally minutes of Googling, I came away confused. Not only did I find multiple sources for the Florida accidental road rage self-shooting, I found story after story about people who accidentally shot themselves in road rage incidents.

There was one in New Zealand, one in California and even one in Texas, which started with a man claiming he was shot by someone else during a road rage incident, before backtracking and confessing that, yeah, he actually shot himself.

But back to how I know it’s a cold winter. It’s not just lizards. You know how else I can tell that it’s winter? Sharks are freezing, too.

According to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, sharks are freezing to death off Cape Cod. The group has recorded three thresher shark deaths so far this winter.

“Cold enough to freeze a shark” sounds like another wise old saying.

You know how else I can tell it’s a cold winter?

The Canadian Press reports that the Calgary Zoo had to bring its penguins inside. How cold does it have to be to freeze a penguin? I saw “March of the Penguins.” Those little guys can handle a serious wind chill. Next we’ll be hearing about homeowners being forced to bring their snowmen indoors.

This might all sound like a quirky, odd, abnormal collection of stories. But there is a real danger here. This isn’t just about dealing with an extra cold winter. This is an indication of serious, long-term climate change, which is going to continue to impact us severely. And I’m not talking about melting ice caps, cyclone bomb storms or flooding.

I am talking about evolving ice lizards making their way north. If this doesn’t alarm you, it should. Our Miami Zoo guy, Ron, says many frozen iguanas survive and then pass their cold-weather-warrior genes along. The result is going to be a species of super lizard that migrates north.

In warm climates, those lizards are everywhere. They hang out around and inside homes. They sometimes pop up in toilets. Toilets! I live in a place where my nostrils sometimes freeze shut and the trade-off is I have never, ever, worried about toilet iguanas until now.

And it sends a chill up my spine.