CREATURE FEATURE : Plight of the Iguana

You know it’s the ‘90s when you ask a friend how her weekend was and she replies: “I was up both nights nursing a sick iguana.” My friend’s iguana, Iggy, is 1 1/2 years old and was as hale and hearty as they come until the other day when my friend noticed that Iggy had stopped eating and couldn’t move his back legs. So she called an expert, a man whose name is, really, legally, Henry Lizardlover, a man who owns 40 iguanas that range in size from six inches to six feet and roam in his house from basement to attic.

Henry Lizardlover recently wrote a book--”The Iguana Owner’s Manual”--and he became agitated when my friend described poor Iggy’s situation. “I get calls like this every day,” he says, “and it is always the same thing.” When he pronounced calcium deficiency, my friend assured him that Iggy ate exactly what the pet store had prescribed--plenty of romaine lettuce.

Which, it turns out, was exactly the problem. Romaine, it

seems, is nothing more than lizard candy; what iguanas really need are calcium-rich leafies like spinach and kale. And they need plenty of direct sunlight or the Vitamin D won’t synthesize. She dutifully hand-fed spinach and cat food to the Igman and set him out for daily sunbaths, which seemed to improve his spirits, though his back legs are still useless and the prognosis is not good. “It’s really sad,” says Lizardlover. “Why don’t pet shops say spinach? Why don’t they say sunlight? It makes you want to tear your hair out.”