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Every few winters a cold front pushes far enough south that Florida wakes up to iguanas lying motionless on sidewalks, patios and pool decks. It looks like a die-off. It usually isn't.
Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are ectothermic, meaning their body temperature tracks the air around them rather than being generated internally. They are a tropical species living well outside their native range, and Florida's occasional cold snaps push them past the point where their muscles work.
Around 40-45°F an iguana enters cold-stunned torpor. Muscle control fades, its grip fails, and it drops from whatever branch it was roosting on. The animal is immobilised, not dead. Warm it back up and it will often revive within hours, which is how people end up with a very alert iguana in the back of their car.
Larger iguanas hold heat longer and tend to survive events that kill juveniles. That size difference matters if you are collecting for the table, because the biggest animals are both the most likely to be alive and the most worth processing.
This is the single most important thing to understand before touching one. A cold-stunned iguana is a live animal with a working set of claws, teeth and a tail it can whip hard enough to raise welts. As it warms in your hands, your car or your garage, it wakes up.
Treat every fallen iguana as live. If you are not prepared to deal with it waking up, leave it alone.
Yes, with real caveats. A cold-stunned iguana is not automatically safe food, and "I found it on the ground" is not a sourcing method that answers the questions that matter.
What you need to know before eating one:
Our guide to iguana safety and health risks covers the pathogen and contaminant side in full, and how to prepare iguana meat walks through butchering and storage.
Most people who find a fallen iguana are not planning to eat it. Here is the short version.
Do not bring it indoors to warm it up. This is the mistake that gets made every single cold event. It is well-intentioned and it is counterproductive: green iguanas are a Prohibited Species in Florida, possession is regulated, and reviving one so it can go back to breeding in the wild works directly against the invasive-species management the state is trying to do.
Do not assume it is dead. See above. People have put "dead" iguanas in car trunks and garbage bags and had them wake up.
Green iguanas are classified as invasive and listed as a Prohibited Species under Chapter 68-5 of the Florida Administrative Code. In broad terms this means they can be humanely killed on private property year-round with landowner permission, and there is no bag limit or season.
Two distinctions matter enormously during a cold snap:
The full picture is on our Florida iguana law page, and the commercial-service boundary is covered in can restaurants serve iguana in Florida.
The most recent major event gives a good sense of the scale these things reach.
In late January 2026 temperatures across South Florida fell into the mid-30s°F, cold enough to put the region's iguana population into torpor more or less simultaneously. On January 30 the FWC issued Executive Order 26-03, temporarily authorising organised collection of cold-stunned green iguanas, with five designated drop-off locations and a collection window of February 1-2.
The response was larger than anticipated. More than 1,000 iguanas were delivered to the FWC's Sunrise office alone. Across all five collection points the total passed 5,100 iguanas collected and humanely euthanised in two days.
The event also produced a viral food moment: a North Palm Beach pizzeria began offering iguana as a topping using meat from cold-stunned animals, drew over 2,500 requests, and was shut down by the Florida Department of Health, a clean illustration of the personal-versus-commercial line above.
The cold did broader damage too. South Florida growers reported significant losses, including roughly 20% of the tomato crop at some farms. There is an irony there worth noting: green iguanas are themselves a documented agricultural pest, damaging crops, landscaping, seawalls and canal banks, so the same freeze that hurts growers also thins the population damaging their land.
Cold-stun events severe enough to drop iguanas in numbers have occurred in 2010, 2018, 2020 and 2026. That is roughly once every three to five years, clustered between December and February, though smaller localised events happen more often than the headline ones.
They are not predictable more than a week or so out. What is predictable is the pattern that follows: iguanas fall, the story goes national, and a large number of people simultaneously start asking whether you can eat one. Knowing the biology, the law and the food safety rules ahead of time is the difference between responding sensibly and improvising.
Assuming you have a legally collected, properly dispatched, promptly chilled animal, iguana is genuinely good eating, mild white meat somewhere between chicken and frog legs. Slow, moist cooking suits it best; it is lean and punishes overcooking.
Reasonable places to start:
Before you start, read what iguana tastes like by cut so you match the cooking method to the piece you have, and how to tell when iguana is properly cooked for doneness and safe temperatures. If you would rather not harvest at all, our sourcing guide covers buying it instead.
FWC Executive Order 26-03 (January 30, 2026) and subsequent FWC public statements; Chapter 68-5, Florida Administrative Code; UF/IFAS guidance on handling and cooking wild-harvested iguana; reporting from Local10, NBC Miami, CBS12, the Washington Post and Euronews on the January-February 2026 cold event; National Geographic's explainer on cold-stunned iguanas and ectothermic biology.
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