Contract renewed for green iguana culling programme

Government has renewed a contract with a local company to continue to cull invasive green iguanas in the Cayman Islands.

Cornwall Consulting, which was first hired to run the culling programme in 2018, was awarded a new two-year, $566,400 contract on 1 Jan.

Since the programme started in October 2018, more than 1.7 million green iguanas have been killed by hunters, the Department of Environment’s deputy director of research and development, Tim Austin, said.

“Everything looks promising for another two years of iguana-control efforts, building on the successes so far,” he told Compass TV.

He added that the ultimate goal is to suppress the iguana population and eventually transition to a lower-cost operation to keep the numbers down.

The request for proposals for the contract noted that although numbers of the lizards have been “severely depleted”, eradicating them fully is “unobtainable at present”.

It stated that “culling efforts must continue in order to further reduce the population and, more importantly, keep the population in its current suppressed state”.

Under the contract, hunting teams and individual cullers, usually armed with air rifles, will continue to operate, mostly on Grand Cayman, though their services are increasingly required on Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, the bid for proposals noted.

It stated that the invasive iguanas were getting a “significant increasing foothold” on both of those islands, leading to a risk of hybridisation with the native Sister Islands Rock Iguana.

According to the request for proposals, the aim of the programme is to reduce the green iguana population on Grand Cayman to about 50,000, and to eradicate them on the Sister Islands.

In the programme, cullers are paid a bounty for each iguana they deliver to a facility at the George Town landfill.