Endangered
Blue iguana
Cyclura lewisi
Blue iguana is a lizard or snake in the family Iguanidae — Cyclura lewisi, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The mature male's skin color ranges from dark grey to turquoise blue, whereas the female is more olive green to pale blue. Young animals tend to be uniformly dark brown or green with faint darker banding. When they first emerge from the nest, the neonates have an intricate pattern of eight dark dorsal chevrons from the crest of their necks to their pelvic area.
An example of island gigantism, the blue iguana is the largest native land animal on Grand Cayman with a total nose-to-tail length of 5 ft (1.5 m) and weighing as much as 30 lb (14 kg).
Range and habitat
The blue iguana is endemic to the island of Grand Cayman. As of 2012, the population can be found throughout the island Grand Cayman excluding the urban areas of Bodden Town, Gun Bay, Seven Mile Beach and West Bay. One theory for how the taxon ended up on the island is that a single female Cuban iguana, C. Nubila nubila, with eggs inside her drifted across the sea, perhaps during a storm.
The blue iguana, also known commonly as the Grand Cayman ground iguana, the Grand Cayman blue iguana, and the Cayman Island rock iguana, is an endangered species of lizard in the family Iguanidae. The species is endemic to the island of Grand Cayman.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The diet is very rarely supplemented with insects, crabs, slugs, and fungi. The blue iguana's herbivorous diet includes plants, fruits, and flowers.
Its color is tan to gray with a bluish cast that is more pronounced during the breeding season and more so in males.
In crisis
Burton reclassified it as a separate species because, according to him, the genetic differences discovered four years earlier between the different C. Nubila populations warranted this interpretation. The blue iguana was possibly abundant before European colonization, but fewer than 15 animals remained in the wild by 2003, and this wild population was predicted to become extinct within the first decade of the 21st century. The species' decline is mainly being driven by predation by cats and dogs, and indirectly by reduction in suitable habitat as fruit farms are converted to pasture for cattle grazing.
Hunting could have also played a role in their decline. This program was created to determine the exact genealogies of the limited gene pool of the remaining animals and DNA analysis revealed that the entire North American captive population was descended from a single pair of animals.
Blue iguana is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Blue iguana, Wikidata item Q730112. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
