St. Pete Times 9/26/2003:

Meet the neighbors

Cape Coral covers 114 square miles, the second-largest area among Florida cities; only Jacksonville is larger. (Tampa is about 110 square miles, St. Petersburg just under 61.)

Washed by Matlacha Pass and the Caloosahatchee River, Cape Coral wears a thick hem of mangroves on much of its shoreline. The city's huge network of canals was dug back in the 1970s, and thousands of acres were cleared. But development went bust, and for years much of the land sat vacant.

Now, wedged between bustling Fort Myers and the resorts of Sanibel and Captiva, Cape Coral is playing out its destiny as a bedroom community. In 1980, the population was about 32,000. By 2000, it had exploded to 102,000, and last year it was just shy of 113,000.

The combination of large areas of undeveloped land, water, woods and diggable banks is Nile monitor paradise, and research in their native Africa has found that, though they eat everything from roadkill to other lizards, their favorite food is eggs: birds' eggs, snakes' eggs, even the eggs of crocodiles.

Campbell first came to Cape Coral years before he heard about the Nile monitors, to help with a survey of the burrowing owl, a species of special concern (meaning it may be on the road to endangerment) in Florida.

Cape Coral has the most dense population of burrowing owls in the state. The owls nest on the ground, laying their eggs in small burrows: a virtual Nile monitor buffet.

Kraig Hankins, an environmental biologist for Cape Coral, was the first person to track Nile monitors. Campbell heard about the animals from Hankins and Ken Krysko at the University of Florida Museum of Natural History.

Hankins, whose work focuses on water quality, says, "I just started keeping track of these reports because I thought somebody should." The city first got reports of "a Komodo dragonlike thing" in 1990 or '91, and occasional reports came in throughout the '90s.

After stories in local newspapers about a year and a half ago, Hankins says, the reports increased. It soon became clear the animals were already all over the city.

Sightings have been most numerous in Cape Coral's southwest quadrant. Hankins says, "The last burrowing owl survey showed they had declined in the southwest cape. Is it the monitors? Is it development? We don't know."

The only way to determine the lizards' impact is research. "We need bodies to prove they're here," Hankins says. And that is why Klowden spends 80 hours a month sloshing through ponds and scrambling down canal banks with a cooler full of reeking squid.

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