Iguanas could be "cattle' of future, biologist says // Costa Rica farm raises reptiles to save forests

By June, some 30,000 bright green, scaly, finger-long iguanas will emerge from their eggs here and begin life as a scientific experiment. Or they may end up smoked and floating in coconut sauce.

Either way, the languid little reptiles will be the latest products of the Iguana Management Project, an ingenious scheme to combine farming with reforestation.

An estimated 52 acres of rain forest are being destroyed per minute, many of them slashed and burned to make farm land and pasture for cattle. Denuded, the thin soil erodes quickly and leaves the land infertile, so farmers keep burning more forest. This is happening in many parts of Latin America. In Panama, for example, where the Iguana Management Project began, about half the forest has been destroyed in 40 years.

So the point of the project is that green iguanas _ jowly, beady-eyed, forbidding-looking, but fairly tame _ live in trees, and can be "ranched" without having to cut the trees down.

In fact, profitable iguana farming can be combined not only with leaving the forest intact, but with re-planting it, according to Dagmar Werner, the director of the experiments. Thousands of iguanas hatched in captivity have been released in Panamanian communities after local farmers agreed to follow a tree-planting program and hunt the iguanas only in certain areas.

"If they don't want to work with me, I tell them forget it," said Werner with a characteristic bark of laughter. After more than six years of painstaking efforts to pioneer the raising of iguanas in captivity, the 45-year-old German biologist likes to be known as "Iguana Mama." Her colleagues also call her simply "La Dagmar."

She moved _ along with more than 2,000 iguanas packed into trucks _ from Panama to Costa Rica in September 1988. The border guards, she recalls, thought she was insane.

But Werner now cooly calculates that an iguana ranch can produce about 700 pounds of low-fat, high-protein meat per acre, per year. That is much more than cattle ranching would yield, and the same land could be ranched indefinitely, instead of only for about three years.

Werner is careful to note, however, that her yield-per-acre calculations are based on supplementing the iguanas' herbivorous diet with a high-protein "Iguana Chow," a secret recipe now custom-manufactured by two companies, one here in Costa Rica and another in Panama. The iguanas eat leaves and fruits when not supplied with chow.

On the small experimental farm here, Werner and her collaborators have also planted papaya trees for the iguanas, and plan on planting other varieties of fruit trees to keep up with demand. "We offer them fruits of the season," said Yara Cerrud, a Panamanian biologist working here.

During a recent visit to the farm, Werner lovingly fed a slice of papaya, seeds and skin included, to her pet iguana Ignacio.

At least 3 feet long including an impressive tail and patrician, horny head, Ignacio is already a great-grandfather. Licking bits of papaya from his leathery lips, Ignacio seemed to be smiling like an alligator. "Yes, that's why I always laugh when I look at them," Werner said.

Ignacio is 5, nearly as old as the project. "I knew him when he was an egg," Werner said, laughing.

He was lucky not to have been eaten at that stage. Popular belief in Central American has it that iguana eggs are aphrodisiac. Asked about it, Armando Batista, a Panamanian who has worked on the iguana project since 1985, replied "it has not been scientifically confirmed."

Iguana skin is used as an ornamental leather, and iguana meat is considered a delicacy by Central Americans and foreigners who taste it. It is like chicken, they say, only much better. The animals have been hunted to extinction in many places.

Although Werner eats iguana, Ignacio will not be cooked. Nor will hundreds of other iguanas kept in special cages on the farm. Each of those is branded twice with miniature wire brands stuck into pieces of cork. The brands record information on the iguanas' lineage, for genetic studies.

But tens of thousands of others, including this year's expected bumper harvest, will be released into the trees.

It is now egg-laying season, and the pregnant females have been segregated into a series of large pens. Buried below the soil of the pens are artificial nests _ small Styrofoam coolers with tunnel entrances. The nests were one of Werner's inventions _ much more convenient for egg-collecting than the earthen labyrinths that iguanas build on their own.

Early each morning, eggs are retrieved from the nests, weighed and re-buried in large covered pits of earth or incubators. In one incubator, eggs are carefully separated and labeled for experiments. In the other, eggs destined for release in the wild are buried together.

When they hatch, the small iguanas will head for the light coming through holes at the ends of the incubators _ and fall into cloth bags tied to the holes, to be collected, weighed and branded.

In three years, they will be ready to produce their own young.

Werner and her Panamanian and Costa Rican colleagues hope to be able to release more iguanas sooner, as they learn more. Their present 5 percent mortality rate is already a tremendous advance over the estimated 95 percent mortality rate in captivity.

But Werner is careful to explain a few caveats. One is that she does not expect to reforest Latin America by breeding iguanas. Although she dreams of integrated wild farms with green iguanas in the trees, black iguanas under the trees, and deer roaming around, there is much more research to do.

Second, although she in convinced that iguana farming can be profitable, considering the demand for meat, eggs, and skin, she has no intention of answering her stacks of letters from eager potential investors. "I want the benefit to go to farmers and the environment, and not to some clever business guy," she said.