Iguana iguana
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Manuel Antonio, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, November and December, with the widest coverage in January, June and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 11 squares of 10 km carry records for Green Iguana in and around Manuel Antonio, and the 30 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
A big male green iguana is two meters of dinosaur theater, whip tail included, in colors that despite the name run from green through orange to slate, crowned with a spiny crest and a solar panel's confidence. They are the most visible large reptile in Costa Rica, stacked along riverside branches, because basking above water is a survival strategy: threatened, an iguana simply falls, crashes through the canopy, and swims off underwater like it planned the whole thing. A third light-sensing organ on the top of the skull, the parietal eye, watches the sky for hawk-shaped shadows while the real eyes mind everything else. Adults are almost entirely vegetarian, which surprises everyone.
Skip any roadside stall offering iguana handling, and never feed wild ones; both feed a capture trade the species does not need.