From: David Miller <dm0@avana.net>David Miller <dm0@avana.net>
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 02:19:50 +0800
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
Subject: [Fwd: Here come the rafting iguanas]Here come the rafting iguanas
Message-ID: <361D269A.3494@avana.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: message/rfc822



For some reason, this reminded me of you and your raft/boat experiment...

Could the term "green iguanas" be symbolic of US currency?

Cheers,

--David

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/od/story.html?s=v/nm/19981008/od/iguanas_1.html

Yahoo! News                                Human Interest Headlines 

Thursday October 8 11:02 AM EDT 

Here come the rafting iguanas

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists said Wednesday they have solved the mystery of
how animal species were dispersed throughout the Caribbean.

Researchers had suspected that animals living on the tropical islands had
probably hitched rides on floating debris to travel to other islands. But
skeptics said the theory was improbable, unobservable and could never be proven.

Until now.

In a letter to the scientific journal Nature, researchers from the United States
and the Caribbean island of Anguilla said they have evidence that green iguanas,
originally from the island of Guadeloupe, used a natural raft to invade and
colonize Anguilla, about 175 miles (281.6 km) away.

``This species did not previously occur on the island. They arrived on a mat
of logs and uprooted trees,'' Ellen Censky, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said.

Local fisherman witnessed the arrival of the 15 refugee iguanas on the eastern
shore of Anguilla in 1995. Censky and her colleagues suspect a particularly bad
hurricane season in the Caribbean that year sparked the exodus.

``Approximately a month after the first of these hurricanes, iguanas reached the
shores of Anguilla,'' said Censky.

The scientists marked many of the males and females that arrived on the raft.
Several months later they noticed that one of the iguanas was pregnant.

``Our observations confirm that raft dispersal can occur successfully, and
document the over-water dispersal of a group of large vertebrates and their
persistence and possible reproduction after landfall,'' Censky added.