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years of continuing to survey before we ask for a declaration of eradication. But there’s no question that we will reach that point.”

    Miami is something of a hub for exotic animals. Its tropical monsoon climate ensures that almost anything that gets there and manages to breed will survive. “We’ve got everything,” says Alex. “You name it, we’ve got it. Just like our culture.”
    Some, like the giant African land snails, are met with a ferocious crackdown, but others become so established there’s little choice but to accept them, and this is what has happened with the iguanas. These lizards, with their outlandish Mohawk-like spines running down their backs, are a common sight in Miami. They especially like the canals. Take a trip along North Okeechobee Road and you can see dozens of them sunning themselves on the banks of the Miami Canal. “They love the canal banks,” says Alex as we drive past. “Who goes out to a canal bank? Nobody. So it gives them a green corridor to go up and down.”
    Most of the iguanas we see lurking on the canal banks are green iguanas, which can grow to six feet long, but there are other types of iguanas in the city too, including the black-and-white-colored Mexican spinytail iguana. “They are not dangerous to humans, but the problem with them is they eat flowers,” says Alex. “We have a wonderful botanic garden, which is beautiful and world-renowned, but it’s challenged because the iguanas go in there and take care of all the buds.”
    Like the snails and the chickens, people brought the iguanas to the city. “Some were escaped pets, but most came from our old zoo,” says Alex. “We had this little zoo out on Key Biscayne, Crandon Park Zoo, and they had iguanas roaming around. The zoo moved and when they left, the problem spread out and they took over the city.”
    Today iguanas are so widespread in Miami that people pretty much ignore them. “They are just kind of accepted. A lot of people don’t even know that they are not native. They poop and people don’t like to look at them, but you can’t get rid of them. And when you have pythons to worry about, iguanas are low on the food chain.”
    Ah, yes, the snakes. The Miami metropolitan area is home to increasing numbers of boas and pythons, which vie with giant African land snails for the title of animal enemy number one. Just a few weeks before my visit, a man in Hialeah discovered a thirteen-foot albino Burmese python living under his shed. Shortly after, a ten-foot-long rock python strangled a sixty-pound Siberian husky to death in a backyard, despite the dog owner’s frantic attempts to kill the snake with a pair of garden scissors.
    Mercifully, attacks on dogs, let alone people, are rare. But the risk is real, so local agencies and biologists have banded together to form the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA for short. Its mission is wide-ranging. Members patrol for giant African land snails in city parks and battle with the mile-a-minute vine, a fast-growing invasive plant with barbed tendrils that smothers rival vegetation.
    Another ECISMA project focuses on the boa constrictors living on the 444-acre Deering Estate in Cutler, fifteen miles south of downtown Miami. Boas have been breeding in Miami since the early 1990s, and ECISMA is trying to learn more about their behavior. To do this they have surgically implanted tracking devices into two boas on the estate—one male, one female.
    I meet up with Dallas Hazelton, preserve manager at the estate, and Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation’s Jane Griffin Dozier, who are both involved in the boa tracking work. The problem with the boas, they tell me, is that they pose a threat to south Florida’s native wildlife, including animals living in the Everglades.
    Like the iguanas, the boas came to Miami as pets, says Dallas: “My records of