Some people leave a lasting impression even after they leave us. Sometimes, those people are iguanas.
“Bubba was an amazing fixture in the department,” said ecology professor Nancy Waters about lab coordinator John Drummond’s green iguana, Bubba.
Animal caretaker Pippa Moody, who looks after the biology department’s lab animals, said she came to work on July 7 and found Bubba dead in her tank. The iguana lived in the vivarium, the space where laboratory animals are kept in the Rockwell Integrated Science Center.
Drummond said most green iguanas live to be around 15 to 20 years old. Bubba lived to 29 years.
“It was sad news, but kind of expected, I guess, based on her age,” Drummond said. Bubba also suffered from arthritis. He said she likely died peacefully in her sleep.
“Bubba got some extra special care while she was here, and I think that definitely led to the life she had,” Drummond said, adding that Moody took “exceptional” care of Bubba.
Professors and students said they will remember the iguana fondly. Drummond said even graduated students contact him and ask about the lizard.
“Bubba was a poster child for the ways in which we can understand the natural world and organisms,” Waters said. “She’s a microcosm for parts of the environment in which we live that we don’t understand as well, we don’t see as much of.”
“Things are so busy all the time,” Waters continued. “Bubba made you sit back and stop and watch.”
Drummond regularly brought Bubba to the introductory biology course and said students frequently listed her as a favorite activity at the end of the semester. Students could hold Bubba and visit her to mist her with a spray bottle.
“She was very much the hit of the lab,” Drummond said.
Bubba stood out from the other animals in the biology department for her unusually large size — she was 2 feet long without her tail, which Drummond said was amputated 10 years ago after it became infected.
“She was genuinely so docile for a gigantic lizard,” said biology major Olivia Wund ‘28, recalling Bubba’s long, but never harmful, claws.
As a teaching assistant, Wund worked with the lab that Bubba frequently visited.
“She really liked her back being stroked, too,” Wund said. “And she was just really cute.”
“What’s so important is I like making a connection, and I think a lot of students have fears based on misunderstandings,” Drummond said. “She really helped people overcome some of those fears.”
Drummond said he first acquired Bubba from his daughter’s teacher, who had to move in the early 2000s. Believing her to be a male, the teacher named the iguana “Bubba” — even when Bubba began laying eggs, the name stuck.
Waters said Bubba helped a “generation of students understand the role that we have as stewards of the ecology of the world around us.”
