Hearing “splashing” coming from his toilet, a 58-year-old Florida man looked into the bowl and found an iguana.
“I look down, and I see this frightened-looking reptile looking back at me,” John Riddle, of Hollywood, told the Orlando Sentinel.
An attempt to use a pool net to remove the lurking lavatorial lizard came to no good, so Riddle “worked up enough nerve to try to grab him” with his bare hands.
The iguana swam “all the way into the toilet, into the pipe. I couldn’t see any of him,” Riddle said.
The reptile eventually climbed out of the toilet and hid behind it. From there, Riddle said, he managed to shoo it out of the house.
“I’m used to” iguanas, Riddle said, “but I’m just not used to them in my toilet bowl.”
Iguanas in toilets may sound like an urban myth on a par with alligators in the sewers of New York City but in Florida they have become a very real problem.
Furthermore, Riddle’s Hollywood home seems to be something of a hotspot for such disturbing encounters.
Last year, Michelle Reynolds told media outlets her toilet in the city near Miami came to contain a Mexican spiny tail iguana, a species that can grow to 18in with an 18in tail added on.
The iguana “took up most of the toilet bowl”, Reynolds said.
As the Guardian reported in 2021, iguanas are an invasive species, “once prized as an exotic curiosity [but] now widely decried as a pest.
“The iguanas hang out on roofs, dig under houses and to the horror of home owners can crawl into sewers only to emerge, thrashing around, in the toilet bowl.”
The Tampa Bay Times has described how the “voracious little Godzillas … tend to be good swimmers, able to hold their breath for an extended time period” before emerging from narrow toilet pipes.
Discussing Riddle’s encounter, Blake Wilkins, owner of Redline Iguana Removal, told the Sentinel the lizards can also enter toilets from above, falling in after gaining access to bathrooms via vents in roofs or walls.
Sightings of toilet iguanas, Wilkins said, prompt “a lot of screaming and yelling usually, that’s for sure”.
Riddle told the Sentinel he had lived in his house “for 21-plus years, and … it never happened before.
“I figure now that it’s happened to me, the odds are probably really good that it won’t happen hopefully for not at least another 21 years or so.”