Komodo dragon how does it survive

They have long, flat heads with rounded snouts, scaly skin, bowed legs, and huge, muscular tails. Komodo dragons have thrived in the harsh climate of Indonesia's Lesser Sunda Islands for millions of years. Though these athletic reptiles can walk up to seven miles per day , they prefer to stay close to home—rarely venturing far from the valleys in which they hatched. When a male dragon locates a female, he scratches her back and llicks her body.

If she licks him back, they mate. Males also sometimes wrestle one another to earn mating rights. Pregnant females then lay about 30 eggs, which they bury in the earth until they hatch eight months later. As the dominant predators on the handful of islands they inhabit, Komodo dragons will eat almost anything , including carrion, deer, pigs, smaller dragons, and even large water buffalo. When hunting, Komodo dragons rely on camouflage and patience, lying in wait for passing prey.

When a victim ambles by, the dragon springs, using its sharp claws, and serrated, shark-like teeth to eviscerate its prey. The Komodo dragon has venom glands loaded with toxins that lower blood pressure, cause massive bleeding, prevent clotting, and induce shock. Dragons bite down with serrated teeth and pull back with powerful neck muscles, resulting in huge gaping wounds.

The venom then quickens the loss of blood and sends the prey into shock. Animals that escape the jaws of a Komodo will only feel lucky briefly. Dragons can calmly follow an escapee for miles as the venom takes effect, using their keen sense of smell to home in on the corpse. A dragon can eat a whopping 80 percent of its body weight in a single feeding.

While asexual reproduction does allow female Komodo dragons to replenish their population—an evolutionary advantage—it has a significant drawback: This reproduction process only results in sons.

The dearth of other females within a population has led to evidence of inbreeding. But tourists are also important to conservation efforts, as the economic boost they provide incentives to locals to help protect the Komodo dragon. This square-mile refuge is also home to species such as the orange-footed scrub fowl and Timor deer, as well as a rich marine environment supporting whales, dolphins, sea turtles, sharks, corals, sponges, manta rays, and more than a thousand species of fish.

It also works with local communities to build awareness of the species and the importance of protecting it. After reaching 20kg, komodo starts to live primarily on the ground, and will begin to utilize a "wait and ambush" strategy to hunt prey. Adults use this strategy to capture deer, boars, horses, water buffaloes, and other Komodo dragons.

As it is at this size at which we have first observed female Komodo dragons attempting to nest. For males, it is more difficult to tell when they reach adulthood as there really are no external signs to indicate this. However, like many other large reptiles e.

The large body size of male Komodo dragons is likely to be very important for determining their access to females for breeding. So unlike the growth of adult females that slows dramatically, indicating they invest much of their energy into reproduction, males continue to grow for several more decades. A large healthy male Komodo dragon can weight in excess of 70kg and reach over 3 meters in length. So adult males are considerably larger than females. The large body size of adult Komodo dragons means that the active searching for prey that they used when they were smaller is no longer very efficient as they would need to move large distances to find enough small prey to meet their energy requirements.

Instead, with the added advantage of much heavier body mass and strength, adult Komodo dragons target very large prey including deer, pigs and at a few localities kill water buffalo. The large difference in body size between males and females is important because it signals not only different strategies, aimed at maximizing reproductive opportunities for each sex but also indicate that the males and females have differences in their life expectancies.

Our estimates of longevity suggest that females live considerably less than males, perhaps as much as half the life span of males, which are thought to persist until they reach an age of One of the most unknown aspects of the Komodo dragon life cycle is really about mating and reproduction.

Komodo is a solitary animal, except during mating season. We presume from infrequent observations of male and females mating that reproduction takes place in June to August.

It is possible that males must actively search for reproductively active females which if they find they will mate with, up to three times compared to their usual travel distances to find females. One of the unusual things that we have observed suggest that males may guard females for some period of time to perhaps ensure that they are the only male to sire her eggs.

Admittedly, they aren't dragons either. The fossil record suggests they evolved in Australia about 4 million years ago, along with an even larger sister species, Varanus priscus.

More recently, when sea levels were lower and distances between the islands were shorter, some Komodos likely swam or rafted to their present sanctuary. When humans arrived in Australia about 50, years ago, things didn't go well for the dragons that stayed home, or their cousins.

Shine said that Komodos and their closest cousins suffered from the same worldwide pattern of megafauna blinking out from areas once humans arrived. The only place the Komodo dragon persisted was the islands, where humans never lived in large numbers.

Komodo Island is quite dry and not a great place for humans to live, even if you forget the threat of being eaten by giant venomous dragons. Somaweera said this is one of the reasons the dragons have likely endured in this small pocket of the world -- the reptiles can survive in an area that large numbers of humans can't. Humans have no interest in that area," he said, adding that the dragons went extinct in lusher, more human-friendly islands such as Borneo, and are only hanging on in small pockets of Flores.

The big lizards could handle a dry environment like Komodo Island because, like all reptiles, they are experts at boom and bust cycles. Being coldblooded, they have lower energy demands, and can survive on little sustenance for months at a time, and fossil evidence shows that the dragons were smaller during periods when there wasn't as much large prey available.

Plus, the Komodos don't seem to be picky about food, and can switch their diets to support their needs.