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An Indonesian folk story tells of a prince about to slay a dragon. Little is wasted: The big lizards aren’t picky about which body parts they eat.ĭespite the dragon’s somewhat off-putting habits, islanders do not necessarily respond with fear and disgust. Scavenging takes less energy than hunting, and the dragons can detect the scent of a rotting carcass from miles away. The lizards also scavenge-they’re opportunists, always on the lookout for food, alive or dead.
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A wounded victim that gets away is likely to pick up pathogens from watering holes, resulting in infection. Their mouths drip with venomous saliva that keeps blood from clotting-so bite victims bleed out quickly. As a backup, dragons do, in a way, breathe fire. The reptiles ambush their prey, ripping open the softest flesh, typically the belly, or maiming a leg. And surely the first humans who saw the animals would have added: Beware! An avid hunter, the Komodo dragon can hit 12 miles an hour in short bursts. The earliest record of this extraordinary lizard is likely the three words “Here be dragons” emblazoned on ancient maps of the region. But much of the year the dragons’ habitat is dragon brown, with monsoon season a brief green reprieve. Jutting abruptly from the sea, these rugged volcanic lands have palm savannas and grasslands. Meanwhile their window on the world is mighty small: They’re found on just a few islands in Southeast Asia, all within the Indonesian archipelago. Dragons put in a good 30 to 50 years, most of the time solo. Varanus komodoensis has the lizard lifestyle down-basking in the sun, hunting and scavenging, laying and guarding eggs with no intention of being a parent after they hatch. This particular species split off maybe five million years ago, but its genus goes back some 40 million, and its dinosaur ancestor lived 200 million years ago. Of course monitor lizards, as the dragon’s family of animals is known, have survived many cycles of change. Even though they are dragons and can grow as long as 9.9 feet and weigh nearly 200 pounds, they are still vulnerable to the modern problems that afflict so many animals, from habitat loss to climate change. With quiet persistence and top-notch Indonesian and Australian collaborators, he has given us much of our knowledge of the dragons and is working to improve their chances of surviving their 21st-century troubles. He sought to understand every aspect of a dragon’s life. “They are as charismatic and interesting as tigers and orangutans. “I expected to find an organization studying dragons,” he recalls. And other scientists weren’t really paying attention to them.
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He arrived in Indonesia in 1994 to complete a Ph.D. He’s the kind of guy who neatly folds his filthy field clothes when he packs to go home. Claudio Ciofi, in his late 40s, a biologist and lecturer at the University of Florence, is mellow, slight of build, with kindly eyes. The man who devised this scheme is not your stereotypical dragon hunter. They’ll likely be empty, but if you’re lucky, you’ll draw near, and there it will be: the world’s biggest lizard, a grim-faced giant known as the Komodo dragon. Revisit each trap in the morning and afternoon for the next two days. Return to camp fill a bucket with cold water and dump it over your head. Set up the first trap with hunks of flesh and hang a few meat bags in trees to “scent” the air. Ignore the 90-plus-degree heat that wraps you up and steams you like a dumpling. Enlist a few strong friends to hoist three ten-foot-long steel traps, grab bags of goat meat, and trek a few miles up and down knee-punishing hills. This story appears in the January 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine.