Cold-Stunned Iguanas in Florida

Often not. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission explains that when temperatures drop and sustain to near-freezing or below, reptiles and amphibians including nonnative green iguanas can go into a state of torpor, where they temporarily lose muscle control and appear frozen, sometimes even falling out of trees. An animal in that state can recover as temperatures rise. The practical consequence is that an iguana on your lawn after a cold night should be treated as possibly alive until it is clearly not, and a reviving iguana is a large animal with claws that has just woken up somewhere it did not choose. That is the reason not to put one in a vehicle or a garage to warm it up.

The state wildlife agency describes the threshold qualitatively rather than numerically, saying near freezing or below. The one numeric figure we could find from a Florida authority comes from University of Florida IFAS Extension, which reports that sustained temperatures of 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit make green iguanas lethargic and stiff, and that they may fall from trees. The word sustained is doing real work there: a brief dip is different from a cold night that holds. Be careful with figures you may see elsewhere. A 40 to 50 degree range circulates widely and we could not source it to any authority, and it appears to be confused with the 50 degree water temperature used for cold-stunned sea turtles, which is a different animal in a different medium.

The safest thing is usually to leave it where it is and let it warm up on its own, keeping children and pets away from it in the meantime. Do not bring it indoors or into a vehicle to revive it. Do not assume it is dead because it does not move. If it is lying somewhere genuinely hazardous, such as in a road or a pool, moving it carefully with a tool rather than your hands is better than handling it directly. How long torpor lasts and what share of animals recover are not things any authority we found publishes, so anyone giving you a confident figure is guessing.

Not now. During the severe cold event at the end of January 2026, the wildlife agency issued a temporary executive order that allowed members of the public to remove cold-stunned iguanas and bring them to the agency without a permit. That order was short-lived by design: it stated that it would expire on Monday, February 2, 2026 at 4 p.m. Eastern unless extended, and it was not extended. The agency has since stated that the order has closed and that it is no longer accepting live green iguanas from the public. It has done this before in an extreme cold event, so it is possible it would again, but nothing published supports treating it as an available route today.

Green iguanas are a nonnative species in Florida and are not protected in the way native wildlife is, except by anti-cruelty law. They may be humanely killed on private property year-round with the landowner's permission. That framing matters for this page mainly as a caution rather than an instruction: humanely is the operative word, and a torpid animal that is alive is not a carcass. If you are dealing with a live nonnative animal rather than a dead one, that is a different subject from anything else on this site, and the wildlife agency is the place to read about it.

Then it is an ordinary carcass and the same rules apply as for anything else in your county. If you are handling it yourself, the state wildlife agency's double-bagging method is the published one, and whether the bag may go in your cart depends on where you live, because Florida counties publish contradictory rules on that. A large iguana is heavier and more awkward than people expect, and after a widespread cold event there may be a number of them at once rather than one, which is the point at which the agency's own advice is to speak to your local waste facility first.