Brent,
Thanks for your feedback. I didn't get any different results using absolute paths in the shebang line. And I'm running under the same account in all cases (the same account whose credentials I'm providing to mysql).
I don't know what a "self-signed SSL certification" is so I don't know if that's what we have, or whether that's a misleading error message. I think we've established that the only thing different is the version (or location?) of Perl and its library of modules.
I'm going to try to figure out if this is a matter of missing modules, or of the way the 5.16 version was configured when it was built.