San Diego Zoo Comes to Aid of Embattled Iguana : Research: Officials persevere with efforts to save endangered Caribbean species despite disruption by Cuban boat crisis, government snags.

Calvin kept a harem of four females--he might be endangered but he was never lonely.

Bugsy was a nice guy but couldn’t get a date despite his beachfront digs, his tough-guy looks and sweet mien. “He had very low testosterone,” said Jeff Lemm, who studied Bugsy.

Hillary, a take-charge type, thought of herself as a breed apart from the rest and would have nothing to do with Blackie, Spike, Rambo and the others.

Such is life among the Cyclura nubila (giant rock iguanas) that inhabit the shoreline of the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: slow, warm and comfy, although a bit shy on company as the population dwindles.

It has largely escaped public notice, but the Cuban iguanas and seven related iguana species that live throughout the Bahamas and Greater Antilles are considered by scientists to be the most endangered of the world’s 3,000 varieties of lizards. Some lizard species on the islands have already disappeared.

But now scientists from the San Diego Zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species are hip deep in a multiyear project funded by the National Science Foundation to study the iguanas of Guantanamo. The goal is to help rescue iguanas on all the islands from the ravages of modernity and their own counterproductive mating habits.

The march of tourist hotels is destroying the iguanas’ habitat. The mongoose, imported to kill the black rat, instead feeds on iguanas. Feral dogs and cats eat baby iguanas that are too slow to run away and too small to fight back. Wild goats devour the plants that are the iguanas’ food supply.

All this predation notwithstanding, there has been little research on how to save the rock iguanas. When it comes to funding and public concern, the iguana is not in the same celebrity class as the Chinese panda, the California condor or the Komodo dragon.

That’s where the zoo’s reproduction center and senior researcher Allison Alberts come in. For the comparative physiologist with a doctorate in biology from UC San Diego, the iguana study is a labor of love. She did her thesis on the desert iguanas of Riverside County.

“I’ve loved lizards for a long time,” she said. “They have great personalities and a very complicated social structure.”

The Navy supports the save-the-iguana movement, but research at a U.S. military base in the only communist country in the Western hemisphere has its idiosyncrasies.

The minefields placed by the Navy to keep hostile Cubans from approaching the base perimeter also help keep the iguana-eating mongoose at bay. The base is loaded with feral cats and dogs, descendants of pets left behind when Guantanamo was evacuated during the Cuban missile crisis.

The iguana project was put on hold for six months because of the influx of Cuban boat people fleeing the Castro government. The refugees were housed at Guantanamo while the two governments see-sawed on how to resolve their fate.

When the scientists were allowed to return, they picked up a valuable (and controversial) piece of intelligence from the refugees: Despite being given protected status by the Cuban government, iguanas are still being caught and eaten by peasants.

In return for its cooperation with the zoo study, the Navy asked the researchers to airlift out a large male named Gitmo (military slang for Guantanamo) who had been branded iguana non grata because of his uncharacteristically aggressive behavior toward military personnel and dependents at Windmill Bay, a popular recreation spot.

Gitmo, a 15-pounder who spans nearly three feet from snout to spiky tail, is now living at the San Diego Zoo. Civilian life has apparently sweetened his disposition, and Gitmo is a frequent star of educational forays to local schools and the zoo’s annual “reptilemania” show.

Gitmo arrived at the zoo just as iguanas are enjoying enormous popularity in America. More than 2 million green iguanas from Central America--the Cuban rock iguana’s smaller, far more prolific cousin--have been imported as pets in the past five years.

Although possessed of powerful jaws, most of the Cuban iguanas are friendly and had become unofficial companions for beach-goers. Unfortunately this led to a steady diet of french fries, hot dogs and Doritos, which can ruin an iguana’s kidneys.

Beyond the iguanas’ irregular diets, scientists also discovered a heretofore unknown characteristic that does not bode well for the iguanas’ survival: a tendency of dominant males to hoard females and to force less assertive males into a life of celibacy.

Male iguanas fight viciously for territory and mates. Female iguanas have little use for the less-macho males. Blood tests showed it’s all a function of testosterone levels.

Only one in four males among the Guantanamo colony can find a mate, and thus the gene pool is not replenished. To give the less-testosterone-fueled males a chance at happiness and preserving their gene line, the researchers removed the “stud males” such as Calvin from the colony for a portion of the six-week courting and mating season.

Freed from the bullying of more dominant males, the less assertive males suddenly experienced a dramatic increase in testosterone and were able to indulge their satyric impulses.

As a stopgap measure to stave off extinction while a plan for predator control and habitat conservation is developed, researchers are also trying a method called “headstarting.”

Eggs were snatched from the wild and taken back to the zoo. Forty-five hatchlings were kept for 18 months before being returned to Guantanamo this summer. Six hatchlings remain atthe zoo for further behavioral studies.

Alberts’ research team will return to Guantanamo every six months to check whether the headstarted iguanas survive and propagate better than those that are native-hatched. For one thing, the headstarted iguanas grew twice as fast as those that stayed behind.

The scientists had hoped to use small radio transmitters to locate the headstarted iguanas on their follow-up trips every six months. But fear of setting off radio-controlled ordnance on base precluded using the transmitters. Microchips and colored tags will substitute.

Although the research was done at Guantanamo, the iguanas there are not the most endangered in the region. That dubious distinction belongs to the Jamaican iguana (Cyclura collei) , which was believed to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 1990.

The Jamaican colony has less than 50. With assistance from the San Diego Zoo, the Hope Zoo in Kingston, Jamaica, is trying its own headstarting approach at restocking the wild population of iguanas.

Headstarting has its critics among researchers. Two fears are paramount: that hatchlings will grow accustomed to being fed in captivity and be unable to readjust to foraging in the wild, and that hatchlings will become overly attached to their human keepers.

To prevent the former problem, the San Diego hatchlings were fed quantities of a plant found at Guantanamo, a particularly noxious, prickly thing called a “touch me not.” To avoid attachment, contact with humans is kept strictly to a minimum.

Although the iguanas’ zoological lineage is one of the oldest on the planet, and even the modern-day species preserve their dinosaur-esque looks, the time left to save the rock iguanas is thought to be short. Some of the species are thought to have no more than a few hundred remaining, most clinging to the shoreline.

“A hurricane that turned the wrong way could wipe out an entire species,” Alberts said.