The Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency is raising the bounty for adult green iguanas to NT$300 apiece for certified iguana removers, after more than 260,000 iguanas were removed nationwide last year.
The ministry last year set up a task force to control the invasive species through collaboration between the central and local governments.
Iguana removal operations used to be suspended toward the end of a year with the government financial cycle, said the agency, but iguana mating season usually occurs early each year.
Photo courtesy of Hsieh Chi-liang
Removal efforts were previously discouraged in military areas, treacherous terrain or cross-border areas where responsibility was unclear, the agency said.
The removal was inefficient because it focused only on the numbers of iguanas removed, while the new strategy focuses on removing breeding reptiles, it said. The new plan operates through the mating season, the agency said.
The agency organized dedicated teams to capture iguanas in the aforementioned gray areas, with more than 1,600 people trained by professional iguana removal contractors, it said.
The agricultural damage claim app developed by the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute was employed to observe and
document iguana activity hotspots, increasing culling efficiency, the agency said, adding these tweaks significantly increased effectiveness.
The more than 260,000 iguanas removed nationwide last year was triple the figure from the year before, it said.
Pingtung County topped the list with 130,288 iguanas removed, followed by Kaohsiung’s 62,608 iguanas, it added.
However, up to 84 percent of the captured iguanas were found to be juveniles with a snout-vent length of less than 30cm. The agency retooled the reward system accordingly.
The reward for each adult iguana with a snout-vent length of 30cm or more captured by people who have received iguana removal training and certification would be raised from NT$250 to NT$300 this year, while the reward for capturing a juvenile iguana would be reduced from NT$100 to NT$50, the agency said.
The NT$500 reward for each adult iguana captured by contractors would remain, but the reward for their haul of juveniles would be decreased from NT$200 to NT$100 each, it said.
People are welcome to help capture green iguanas, but only those who have received training and certification from local governments can earn rewards, the agency said, calling on people not to cause unnecessary harm to iguanas in their removal actions.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS