Back in college, a friend built a dredge he used to fill what is not the Walmart on Cape Coral. The iguanas were five feet long years ago, and not at all uncommon.
The “Endangered Florida Panther” team uses a plane with obsolete tracking gear (mo’ bureaucraps at the Feeding Trough that way), to track those pampered panthers. I have watched that place make the usual higher altitude passes and the final low pass over the “eco-reserve” just on the other side of one of the canals in his development.
Cats, ‘crats, huge reptiles and . . . Snakes Alive, it a python place, too!
We even have some Spanish speaking Anoles all the way up here.