A photograph of a spiny black iguana wearing a bright red crab like a necklace has Reddit calling it Godzilla. The picture, credited in the post to photographer @dale_r_morris, climbed to r/popular this week under the title “Photographer captures iguana that looks like Godzilla.”
The joke lands because the resemblance is real. The animal in the shots is a Galápagos marine iguana, as several commenters pointed out, and one population of that species was formally named after the movie monster in 2017.
Crab jewelry and kaiju jokes
The thread filled up fast. “Godzilla with bling!” one reader wrote. Another called the crab “the illest bling,” and a third said the shots “get progressively better and better.” Plenty of people simply admitted they thought it was a Godzilla toy with crabs on it until they checked which subreddit they were in.
The crab is not decoration, though. On the Galápagos, Sally Lightfoot crabs sometimes walk over marine iguanas and pick ticks and mites off their skin, and the iguanas usually ignore them. Darwin’s finches and mockingbirds do the same job. A commenter summed it up as a crab spa, which is close to the truth.
The iguana that really is named Godzilla
Marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) live only on the Galápagos Islands, which belong to Ecuador. A 2017 review of the species by Miralles and colleagues split it into 11 subspecies and gave one of them, from the northeastern part of San Cristóbal Island, the name A. c. godzilla, in honor of the film character.
Hollywood had already made the link. In the 1998 American Godzilla, the monster is a marine iguana mutated by radiation into a giant that wrecks New York. Fans in the comments are still arguing over which version of the monster counts. The newest Japanese film, Godzilla Minus Zero, opened to a record $31.6 million in North America this month, so the timing could hardly be better for a lookalike.
Five facts about the real-life kaiju
- The only sea-going lizard. No other living lizard forages in the ocean. Large males dive for red and green algae; females and smaller males graze rocks at low tide.
- Deep divers. They can reach about 30 meters (98 feet) and stay under for up to an hour, though most dives are short and shallow.
- Salt sneezers. Glands near the nostrils filter salt from the blood, and the iguana blasts it out in a sneeze. That is why some heads look crusted white.
- Not all black. Males on Española, Floreana and Santa Fé turn pink-red and turquoise in the breeding season and are sometimes called “Christmas iguanas.”
- Size depends on the island. The heaviest males reach 12 kilograms (26 pounds) on southern Isabela, while those on tiny Genovesa top out near 1 kilogram.
Why visitors once hated them
Early sailors were not charmed. Charles Darwin, who saw them in 1835, described “most disgusting, clumsy Lizards” on the black lava rocks and noted that someone had called them “imps of darkness.” Modern visitors line up to photograph them instead.
Their ancestors probably reached the islands from Central or South America by rafting on floating debris, the same way early monkeys probably rafted across the Atlantic to South America. Today the species is listed as vulnerable. The total population is estimated at 200,000 to 300,000, and the eastern San Cristóbal group that carries the Godzilla name is among those rated endangered, with a maximum of about 400 animals on that island.
For more animal stories like this one, see our Pets & Animals section. As for the photo’s star, it can dive 30 meters, sneeze salt and wear a live crab as a collar, which is more than the movie version ever managed.
Further reading
Image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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