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A couple discovered an iguana in their toilet. Neither knows how it got there but wants others to know how to avoid a fright hard to forget.
Inside the Collins’ wooden fence beyond the synthetic lawn, the couple hoped iguanas hate, an uninvited guest squatted in the guest bathroom.
“I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Crystal Collins said in a cell phone video recorded after the discovery Friday evening. “His eyes are open and he’s green. I swear to God if he jumps I will (expletive) die!”
The sight shook her almost as much as her husband.
“The sounds that came out of my husband were so funny,” Crystal Collins said. “We search the cameras in our house to find out if we could get a sound bite of it. It was very manly.”
Her husband grew up in North Miami. She has spent 26 years in South Florida. However, they’ve never had an iguana in their house until Friday.
As Collins’ husband lifted the toilet seat to use the restroom he found a motionless, green iguana floating in the toilet bowl.
“We both looked at each other like what are we going to do,” she said. “I joked about burning the house down but the reality (was) how are we getting this out? Neither of us do lizards.”
The owner of Iguana Control told CBS News Miami that if an iguana gets inside a home or business it is important to contain the reptile to one room. This prevents trappers from spending time searching for the lizard in order to remove it.
“It’s a big bunny rabbit,” Thomas Portuallo, owner of Iguana Control said. “It’s docile. (Iguanas) will run from you unless your corner it.”
Iguana Control removes the reptiles from homes and businesses from Key West to Melbourne, Florida. Usually, homeowners leave doors or windows open which allows iguanas to gain entry, Portuallo said. Sometimes iguanas climb in through rooftop pipes, which you can prevent by installing mesh wire covers, Portuallo said. Once a month, Iguana Control crews find the reptiles getting in through sewers.
“That’s difficult to protect against,” Portuallo said. “That needs to be free flowing so that, of course, the waste goes away. You can’t cap that or put a screen on it or anything like that.”
In the Collins’ case, they text a friend who used a trash bag and his hand to pull out what seemed like a dead iguana.
“He’s not dead,” Crystal Collins said on the video.
If it or another reptile comes back, the Collins said they might consider moving out.
“If it happens twice, now we’re getting close to that epidemic territory,” Collins said.
When told two cases hardly represent an epidemic, Collins said with a laugh, “Well, it’s close.”
