Now Beebe was actively observing tropical animal life for forty years and this was the most intelligent iguana activity he was able to report. Draw your own conclusions.
Your pet can be expected to respond in ways you can measure to warmth, light, food, dogs, and water, but you will need a lot of patience and a sharp eye to spot many of these responses.
When in trouble, an iguana heads for a tree or for water. The ideal escape would be up a tree overhanging water, then to drop into the water, swim underwater and quietly come to the surface sometime later. If things get worse, and only as a last resort, the iguana can drop most of his tail. The discarded appendage will swish about for a while and perhaps distract the enemy while the reptile makes his escape. The tail stump will bleed a little then heal and slowly regenerate, but it will never be as nice as the original. There will be a scar line and the new tail will probably be solid black rather than black-banded green, and possibly it will not be as long as the original. C’est la vie!
Common iguanas are arboreal. They like to live in trees. They could spend their entire adult lives in trees, the females coming down once a year to dig burrows in a sandy hillside to lay eggs and the young remaining on land until they get too large or slow or hungry to subsist on just crickets and smaller reptiles. Your pet should be permitted to climb and perch and feel secure on a high window sill, valance or mantle piece. He can manage without the water under the perch if you provide a place to bathe or soak once in a while.
Longevity records for iguanas suggest that ten years for a common green iguana is not at all unusual. One pet kept in an apartment is known by the author to be over twelve years old. W. Michael Carey of the University of South Florida, Tampa, reported on two caged pets, one of which lived twelve years and five months; when it died it measured about 13 1/2 inches from snout to vent. Since the tail might be more than three fifths the total length, we could estimate a total length of perhaps four feet. Another captive lived ten years and five months; its snout-vent length (SVL) was about twelve inches.