The Dragons of the Komodo Islands
March 23, 2012
These giant monitor lizards have survived for 150 million years, and emerge as witnesses to a distant prehistory.
Photo taken by the author in March 2013 on the island of Rinca. An endearing look ...
Between 1,500 and 2,000 monitor lizards remain on various islands located 500 km east of Bali (Komodo, Rinca and Flores). These cold-blooded animals have survived 150 million years of history. These beasts can commonly reach 3 meters in length and weigh 150 kilos. Exclusively carnivorous, these monitor lizards feed on the livestock present on the islands: deer, wild boars, and even buffalo. In fact, they eat any animal that comes within their reach, monkeys, birds, and they hunt by day as well as by night. Remarkably adapted, these giant lizards are equipped with strong claws, can swim, and climb trees, when they are young.
Juveniles, during their first years, moreover use this latter ability to climb to escape the predatory instinct of adults, for whom they represent 5% of their food. The females, when they lay eggs, must deploy prodigies of imagination to protect their eggs, laid in underground shelters. Thus, they set up around the nest false nests, empty, or near which they place a young, dead one.
The main weapon of the Komodo dragon is its saliva, which contains 60 highly pathogenic bacteria. It thus kills its victim by infection, with a single bite. All it has to do then is follow it, thanks to its extremely developed sense of smell, the organ for capturing molecules being its tongue. A Komodo monitor lizard can detect and track prey a kilometer away. When the animal is sufficiently weakened, the dragon devours it almost entirely. Videos can be found where a monitor lizard swallows a small wild boar whole, bones, hooves, everything included. Its digestive juices take care of the rest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrx-ohT9r1s
When tourists show up for an exploration of the sites, the guide asks women who have their period to refrain from joining the group, the smell of blood being able to attract monitor lizards, imagining they are dealing with a bitten prey.
The apathy of these animals is as deceptive as that of crocodiles. As with these animals, the attacks are extremely brutal and unpredictable. When one sees them, one has difficulty imagining that they could pursue deer at a running speed of 20 km/h. See this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6Riq-d4W_o&NR=1&feature=endscreen
It will be noted, even if in this sequence the monitor lizard misses its prey, that this run is prolonged, and is not limited to a few meters. The guards have rather derisory defensive weapons:
The author with the guards and their means of defense. Both of them: 50 kilos soaking wet
Two weeks before my arrival, a guard and a tourist had been injured (count months of hospital, to have a chance of overcoming the infectious process). While trying to oppose the monitor lizard's charge, the guard, jostled by a beast weighing three times his weight, had been thrown to the ground and also bitten.
It must be said that tourists seem totally unaware of the risk incurred.
French tourists, totally unaware, in a state of great excitement, filming the rapid approach of a Komodo dragon. Fortunately, the guides rush over and will manage to drive the animal away
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNwwFRcfAao&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Komodo monitor lizards have no enemies other than themselves. Never having been hunted, and knowing the pathogenic effectiveness of their bite, they do not hesitate to attack prey weighing five times their weight, such as buffalo. What is astonishing is that these do not seem aware of the danger. See this third video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHB_CM86rgk
The buffalo, totally unaware of the deadly risk represented by the approach of a dragon that it could easily put to flight with a blow of its hooves.
The dragon bites the buffalo on the leg
The latter easily frees itself. This bite, a light one, is almost painless.
The monitor lizard's teeth are tiny, barely able to pierce the buffalo's hide.
Here is the wound, superficial
A venomous snake must, in order to kill its prey, manage to inject a sufficient volume of venom into it, otherwise the prey escapes. What is extraordinary, in this secret weapon of the Komodo dragon, is that it does not need to inject a large dose of saliva. If the bloodstream is reached, even minimally, the bacteria will multiply. And the animal will die from infection. Everything is then only a matter of time. Attracted by the smell of blood, the other monitor lizards will rush over and follow their victim, which will weaken over the days, without even realizing that this weakening comes from this bite, almost painless.
The buffalo weakens more and more, closely followed by the monitor lizards
Until the kill, as soon as it becomes too weak to react
In fact, animals can only integrate the dangerousness of another species if they can make the connection between the death of one of their own kind and the attack by that predator. In the case of this death by infection, several days pass between the almost painless bite of the monitor lizard and the death of the animal. It is logical, then, that the buffalo do not perceive the deadly danger they are in and do not try to flee.
What is also remarkable is that a monitor lizard, even of modest size, can kill a 500-kilo beast with a few cubic millimeters of a lethally infectious saliva.
I have shown, above, the smallness of the animal's teeth. They are not made to kill instantly, crush or chew. Like the teeth of sharks, broken, they are replaced by others. But a close-up tells us more:
The teeth of the Komodo dragons
Like the teeth of sharks, they work like saws. If you look for other videos where you can witness the meals of Komodo dragons, if the prey is too big to be swallowed in one go, the animal will have to tear off pieces of it. Unlike, for example, a hyena, which can crush a limb, and even a bone of large caliber, with its teeth, the dragon shakes its head, pulling on the flesh. In doing so it makes its ... saw-shaped teeth work. The shark does the same.
I saw, in Marseille, in the early sixties, Roger Poulain's fin, which had been attacked by a shark when he was freeing an amphora from a wreck located near the islet of Planier. This rubber fin, of the Cressi brand, was cut as if with a razor, by a jaw that must have been 40 cm wide. The operation had been done by this sawing operation, the shark shaking its head from right to left.
Poulain, at the time of the shark attack. Behind: the Maïre island. In the foreground: the Italian Cressi fins of the time. On the left a "makeshift triple-tank", the tanks being fastened together with inner tube.
Poulain had not seen the beast, which must have measured around 3 meters. I saw the object and heard his account as he was returning from this dive, to his home port of Cap Croisette.
From memory: Roger's fin, severed. One guy can vouch for it: a certain Daniel Bertaux, a polytechnicien, who was a witness, and was like us about twenty years old. Roger gave him the object as a gift. He had a career as a sociologist at the CNRS. Example of the most significant works
Daniel Bertaux, today. Obviously, we have all changed a little ...
He has a website:
http://www.daniel-bertaux.com/accueil/index.html
On which his photo has not, it seems, been updated.
Poulain had felt himself grabbed by a fin and shaken, and had said to himself
- But who is this idiot! ? ...
Turning around, he had seen nothing, but as he finned, he had gone off ... sideways. Following our discussion, he said:
- Well, if that shark was counting on having my leg, all he got left with was a bit of chewing gum!( with the Marseille accent )
I continue on this digression. Readers may perhaps be surprised at the idea that there can be sharks in waters near Marseille ( the Planier lighthouse is 8 miles from the coast ). One must also place the event back in the era when it occurred: more than 40 years ago. The Mistral cools the water, not because it speeds up evaporation, but because it drives the surface layer of water out to sea. It is replaced by water from deeper layers, therefore colder.
Sharks, there are some, off the coasts of the Midi, but in deep waters. Off Marseille it takes a good week to drive the water that is above the continental shelf out to sea. Then water from depths of 200 meters is brought near the coast. The whole ecosystem follows, and the sharks with it. As soon as the water warms up, they return to their natural habitat, beyond 200 meters deep.
When there is a Mistral, people do not swim. But thanks to their wetsuits, divers dive anyway. Hence Roger's misadventure (the bite was right at his toes).
After our "exploit" with this story of a basking shark, in poor condition, 4 m 20 long, that we had brought back to the Croisettes beach ( renamed with the stupid name of "Baie des Singes" ), we had become the "shark specialists", locally.
The basking shark of the Croisettes, its mouth held open by a concrete rebar
I am on the right. Stroking the shark, Poudevigne. Invited by Cousteau, Conrad Limbaugh, "the American Cousteau" of the time, director of an oceanology institute in California, had asked to visit the hole of Port-Miou (an underground river opening into this cove ).
Conrad Limbaugh, 1924-1960
On March 20, 1960 they had gone there without an Ariadne's thread. Poudevigne lost Limbaugh. He searched for him desperately, until his air ran out and the American was found dead. When Poudevigne alerted his comrades to the fact that he had come back out without the American, it was a complete rush. Indeed there was a non-zero probability that the latter might have found refuge in a large air pocket located a few hundred meters from the entrance. It was the divers from Sogetram who recovered his body, A few months after the tragedy I had dived with Jean-Claude Mitteau, a student, like me. My buddy at the time (today he is organist at the church of Nexon, Limousin). Unrolling a hemp string, wound on a cylindrical reel threaded on a piece of wood, hung around my neck, each equipped with two tanks, one on the back, one on the belly, and very powerful "Girault" lamps, we had gone up the river for 400 m. The trick was that we did not rewind the string, we left it in place. Hence a high speed of progression, both on the way out and on the way back. And obviously, on the way back, we followed our Ariadne's thread.
Let's first come back to this thresher shark story. As this species does not have muscles allowing it to oxygenate its gills, when stopped, it had died asphyxiated.
Thresher shark
I had therefore positioned myself under the shark and had, as for the basking shark, passed a rope around its tail. Then the fishermen had hoisted it on board. But it was not completely dead. It struggled, gave furious tail lashes. On board was a navy retiree, who did not have the reflex to jump into the water. Now the tail of a thresher shark can be compared to a flat ruler, on which you would have glued sandpaper. The guy took a tail lash on the calf: three stitches.
Memories, memories ...