Invasive Argentine tegus have found a home in Florida. Are there any near Jupiter?
Tegus are like a cross between an iguana, a snake and a lizard, and people are seeing them more often near Palm Beach County.
The invasive Argentine black and white tegu has 'reproducing populations' in Hillsborough, Miami-Dade and Charlotte counties, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Scientists also discovered an 'emerging population' in St. Lucie County.
Tegus in other Florida counties are likely there because they are escaped or released pets. Still, the lizards have been spotted crawling around Palm Beach County for more than a decade, said Amy Kight, executive director of Busch Wildlife Sanctuary in Jupiter Farms.
She gets calls about tegu sightings around canal banks at least once a year.
'I have a feeling people see them more, but just don't know what they are looking at,' wrote Kight in a prepared statement. 'They come from all over the place. We have cared for a few over the years.'
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Argentine black and white tegus are not native to Florida, but to South America: Brazil, Paraguay, eastern Uruguay and northern Argentina.
The omnivores are only protected by anti-cruelty laws in Florida and can be humanely killed on private property with permission from the landowner, according to FWC. They can also be captured and humanely killed without a permit or hunting license on 32 Commission-managed lands in South Florida.
The lizards can reach nearly 5 feet long and live up to 20 years. They lay about 35 eggs each year.
They have a dotted black-and-white pattern along their backs and tails. While they are climbers, they rarely reach more than a few feet off the ground. Tegus are also strong swimmers.
They hibernate during the winter months. In South Florida, they emerge from their burrows in February, just in time for breeding in spring.
Tegus can be dangerous if people try to catch them, but they are not considered aggressive.
They don't typically chase people and attack them if left unprovoked, Kight said.
However, they are known as egg-eaters and can disrupt Florida wildlife. They may eat American alligator eggs and gopher tortoise hatchlings.
Those who find tegus should not try to catch the tegu themselves.
Instead, take a picture of it and call FWC, which has a wildlife alert hotline at 888-404-FWCC (888-404-3922).
FWC also encourages people to report tegu sightings to its exotic species hotline at 888-Ive-Got1 (888-483-4681).
Tegus are a prohibited species in Florida and cannot be kept without a permit from FWC.
People who have tegus as pets can surrender them without penalties through FWC's exotic pet amnesty program.
Maya Washburn covers northern Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida-Network. Reach her at mwashburn@pbpost.com. Support local journalism: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: What is a tegu? Iguana-looking reptile is spotted in Palm Beach County
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Don't buy fancy butter to make great pie. Here's why
When it comes to the fat in pie dough, there are no kings. In terms of its ingredients, pie dough couldn't be more straightforward: For the most part, it's flour, butter and water. With so few ingredients, it begs the question: Does the quality of the butter make a difference? Typical American butter — brands such as Land O'Lakes, Cabot, Challenge and supermarket private labels — contains 80% butterfat. Many of the brands also offer extra-creamy lines. These 'European-style' butters have a higher butterfat content. Kerrygold from Ireland has a butterfat content of 82% to 83%, and Plugra, which is made in the U.S., is 82% butterfat. Ironically, European-style butters with the highest percentage of fat are from small American creameries: Straus Family Creamery in Marin County makes a European-style butter with 85% butterfat, and Vermont Creamery has a whopping 86%. 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Kerrygold has a bright, rich yellow hue that comes from the grass the cows graze on, and that makes for a buttery-colored dough. But that color didn't translate to the baked crust. I baked the dough off into little crackers. The Land O'Lakes crackers were light and flaky. As hopeful as I was about the Kerrygold, what with that beautiful buttery-colored dough, the crackers were flat. Barely a flaky layer in sight. Of course, both were delicious. Butter is butter. There's no question that butter, any butter, does reign supreme when it comes to contributing flavor to pie dough. For flakiness, there are still those who swear that shortening makes for the flakiest pie crust, which, more widely known by the brand name Crisco, is a solid fat made from primarily soybean and palm oils. Crisco is so popular in baking that, previously offered only in small tubs, the product is now sold in sticks, so it can be used in a recipe without making a mess stuffing it into a measuring cup. 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Atlantic
6 hours ago
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What Are Emoji?
In the arenas of ancient Rome, the thumbs-up was a matter of life and death. So scholars have extrapolated from the elusive history of ancient gestures. The fates of defeated gladiators were determined by an emperor or another official, who might heed the wishes of the crowd: Thumbs hidden within closed fists were votes for mercy; thumbs-ups were votes for death. Today, the 👍, now flipped into a gesture of approval, is a tool of vague efficiency. Deployed as an emoji—as a hand summoned from a keyboard, suspended between literalism and language—it says 'okay' and declines to say more. But lately the crowds of the internet have found new ways to channel the old dramas. On the matter of the 👍, the arbiters of our own arena—internet-savvy young adults—have rendered their verdict: The 👍 is no longer definitive. It is no longer, for that matter, necessarily positive. 'Gen Z Has Canceled the Thumbs-Up Emoji Because It's 'Hostile,' ' one headline put it, citing data gathered in surveys and in the wild. Particularly as a reply to messages that contain words, Zoomers say, the 👍 is dismissive, disrespectful, even 'super rude.' It's a digital mumble, a surly if you say so, a sure but screw you. It is passive aggression, conveyed with pictographic clarity yet wrapped in plausible deniability. News of this emoji revisionism spread for the same reason so many of Gen Z's pronouncements do: Young adults, speaking internet with native-language ease, have an air of authority. But the news also spread because it was a warning of sorts about online communication at large. The double-edged 👍 meant that you could mean 'yes' or 'sounds great' while saying 'no,' or even 🖕. In online conversations, you can think you've said one thing and be read as having said another. Some have argued that the internet is creating a new kind of Babel. Here, in a cheerfully cartoonish form, were intimations of just that. Different groups of internet users—in this case, generations—can speak the same language and a different one. From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid Emoji (derived from the Japanese for picture and written character) were meant to bring humanity to conversations conducted across digital distances—to introduce a warm splash of color and expressiveness into a realm of text. Emoji are common property: Anyone can use them. Any group can define them in its own quirky way. But the resulting ambiguity can fuel tensions as well. Emoji have given rise to new codes of bigotry (🐸👌🥛) that allow their users the same plausible deniability that the 👍 does. Emoji can be cute, and they can also permit hatred to hide in plain sight. Have emoji enhanced communication, or abetted chaos? If emoji belong to everyone and no one, who gets to say what the default meaning might be? Emoji are less a language than they are 'insurgents within language,' Keith Houston writes in Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. As his lively exploration of the form usefully puts it, they are the 'lingua franca' of the web, and the route they have traveled is more complicated than you might think. Their antecedents are ancient (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Mesoamerican pictograms), though the journey from their modern birthplace (Japan circa the turn of the millennium) to their current ubiquity has been quick. That doesn't mean it has been smooth. Houston is contagiously enthusiastic about 'vibrant, vital emoji.' 🤗 He is also alert to the mixed blessings of the icons' versatility, their 'many-splendored entanglement with the written word.' 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Exploding in popularity as digital chatting caught on—an ascent that accelerated when Apple, Google, and their fellow behemoths became emoji adopters—the pictograms acknowledged no national boundaries. In 2011, a year after emoji officially came under the supervision of a nonprofit called the Unicode Consortium, Apple introduced an emoji keyboard to its U.S.-marketed iPhones, bringing hearts and party poppers and sun-yellow faces to text messages throughout the land. The website Emojipedia, aiming to provide an exhaustive catalog of emoji, arrived in 2013. In 2014, a campaign got under way on the digital-petition site 'The Taco Emoji Needs to Happen,' it announced. The petition received more than 30,000 signatures, and the 🌮 was born. Taco Bell had been the catalyst. Two years later, an article titled 'A Beginner's Guide to Sexting' outed another 🌮 meaning, one its corporate sponsor likely never anticipated (vagina). Emoji, the not-quite-a-language language, were becoming part of the world's linguistic—and commercial—infrastructure, importing some of the unruliness of IRL interaction into virtual spaces. People used emoji to accentuate (👏🎉😂). They used emoji to hedge (😑🤔🌤️). They used emoji to joke (😜). They used emoji to flirt (😍😉). Emoji were pictures that could extend people's voices, visual icons that could help convey intended tone. They said nothing precisely, and that allowed them to express a lot: enthusiasm, sarcasm, anger, humor. They followed the same broad arc that the internet did; having originated as quirky novelties, they were becoming utilities. By the mid-2010s, the 'staid old Unicode,' as Houston comes to call the Consortium, had discovered the headaches accompanying 'emoji fever.' The organization, launched in 1991, was composed of a rotating group of engineers, linguists, and typographers charged with establishing coding consistency across the internet's static characters (letters, numbers, and the like); its goal was to enable global communication among disparate computers. Now it found itself overseeing dynamic characters as the public clamor for more emoji mounted. The Consortium was the gateway to new emoji: It invited the public to suggest additional icons. But its technologists were gatekeepers, too. They reviewed the applications, assessing the level of demand. They were the ones who decided which images to add—and which to deny. (Durex's campaign for a condom emoji fell short.) The annual unveiling of their decisions became, in some quarters (🤓), a much-anticipated event. Each new 'emoji season' brought fresh collections of icons to users' devices. But each also stirred reminders of the icons that weren't there. Faced with feedback from users frustrated by icon selection that could seem capricious and unfair, the arbiters did their best, Houston suggests, to gauge popular support for new candidates. But lapses in the lexicon were obvious, as a mere sampling reveals. Early on, 'professions' were depicted as masculine by default. 'Couple' was a man and a woman. The woman's shoe was a ruby-red heel. Representations of food reflected the pictograms' Japanese origins and U.S. tech dominance, but not their worldwide story. In the quest for more choices—and in response to users' campaigns—the Consortium added, among many other emoji, an array of food items. (They were not always culturally authentic: In an attempted nod to China's culinary traditions, a takeout box joined the lexicon.) In 2015, the group introduced five 'realistic' skin-tone options for humanlike emoji figures. The update brought unintended consequences. Lined up next to other hues, the sunny yellow originally meant to scan as race-neutral (in the lineage of the classic smiley face, Lego mini-figures, and the Simpsons) now read, to some, as racist. Light skin tones, intended to reflect users' skin color, evoked, Houston notes, a similar reaction: Some saw the choice of those light-hued symbols as a 'white power' gesture. Complexity, when emoji are involved, will always find its way back. The Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee—a 'crack team of emoji wranglers,' in Houston's words—had its hands full. Gender updating in particular proved challenging. Early Unicode guidance on depicting emoji people had emphasized, but not required, striving for gender neutrality. To move beyond stereotypes, should equity or androgyny lead the way? Same-sex couples and same-sex parents were soon included. Women were liberated, as one peeved op-ed writer had urged, from 'a smattering of tired, beauty-centric' emoji career options: 16 professions, available in male and female versions, were added. To Houston's surprise, the 2017 gender-focused emoji season met with no political or press furor—perhaps owing to public 'emoji fatigue,' he speculates. (Androgyny lived on that year, for the most part, as fantasy—through the magical figures issued in the new batch 🧙🧚🧛🧜🧞.) How much control, at this point, the subcommittee can exert over emoji denotation and connotation isn't clear. Unicode's emoji now coexist with platform-specific icons that users can customize for themselves (think: stickers, Bitmoji, Memoji). The latest iterations, such as Apple's Genmoji, use artificial intelligence to create ever more adaptable pictograms. Meanwhile, Unicode's emoji are becoming only more protean: The 💀 has expanded from a mark of disapproval to a sign of amusement (death via laughter). 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Emoji float, merrily (mostly), over the barriers. And their ambiguity is essential to their buoyancy. Emoji, as images, can never be tethered to one meaning. Even if 'emoji season' ceases to yield new crops, the icons that exist will keep evolving. They will keep challenging us to evolve with them. The namesake of Houston's book, the 'face with tears of joy,' has long been the world's most popular emoji. It has also been, according to recent reports, the subject of another Gen Z pronouncement: The 😂 is cringe. What it communicates, above all, is the hopeless unhipness of its sender. I use it anyway, mostly out of habit but also because, to me, joyful beats cool every time. And my 😂 are in good company. Each day, around the planet, billions of 😂 ping across screens. Their usage might decline in the future. Their primary meaning might change. For now, though, they are what we have. For now, because of them, we can laugh together across the distance.
Yahoo
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