KOMODO DRAGON FEEDING: PREY, HUNTING BEHAVIOR AND VENOM

KOMODO DRAGON FOOD

Komodo dragon stalking a Timor deer

Komodo dragons live in scrubby hillsides and open woodland and feed on live animals and carrion. They have been observed feeding on wild pigs, goats, deer, poisonous snakes, birds, small mammals, water buffalo, and other Komodo dragons. They have also been observed digging up nests of birds. Adult Komodo dragons will feed on small juveniles if given the chance. Remains of young dragons have been found in the droppings of adults. Most young animals escape the large lizards by scrambling up trees. The large lizards, with their bulk, can not climb the trees.

Komodo dragons will feed on about any living creature — from grasshoppers to horses — and have been observed traveling 10 kilometers from their home territory to find the source of a strong odor. Young dragons feed mainly on insects and geckos. As they grow they seek out larger prey, with medium-sized on pursuing birds and rats. Large ones seeking large prey such as deer and wild pigs do most of their hunting in the late morning. [Source:“Beastly Behaviors” by Mark Leigh, Mike Lepine, and Rolf Harris, 1997 +++]

Komodo dragons seek out and fed on carrion. They are often seen on beaches looking for dead fish or birds. They have a keen sense of smell and can pick up the scent of decaying remains three kilometers (five miles) away. Jennifer S. Holland wrote in National Geographic: “They’re opportunists, always on the lookout for food, alive or dead. Scavenging takes less energy than hunting. Little is wasted: The big lizards aren’t picky about which body parts they eat. /=/ [Source: Jennifer S. Holland, National Geographic, January 2014 /=/]

Richard C. Paddock wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The Komodo, which shares a common ancestor with dinosaurs, hunts such creatures as deer, pigs, goats and other dragons. It can run quickly in short bursts but often lies in wait until an animal comes within a few feet, then attacks it. Komodos have poor hearing but an extraordinary sense of smell. The lizards use the tips of their long, pale, forked tongues to gather air samples and then brings those to odor receptors on the roof of its mouth. The tongue continually flick in and out as the animals plod along, swaying from side to side. [Source: Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2006]

Komodo Dragon Hunting Techniques

Komodo dragons hunt mainly by ambushing their prey such as wild pigs, deer and even water buffalo. Young ones go after snakes, lizards and rodents. Komodo dragons use their keen sense of smell and their long darting forked tongue to locate prey or carrion. They are not regarded as clever hunters. Mostly, it is believed, they wait along game trails, camouflaged in the bush, and then leap and knock down prey with their long tails or wound it and track it down later. Sometimes they sneak up on deer in their daybeds and stalk water buffalo, a creature up to 20 times bigger than a Komodo dragon. If the dragon gets close enough, it lunges at the hindquarters of the buffalo, ideally hanging on the leg long enough to severe the Achilles tendon with its serrated teeth, bringing the large bovine to ground, or injuring it severely enough that it can kill it when it weakens hours later.[Source:“Beastly Behaviors” by Mark Leigh, Mike Lepine, and Rolf Harris, 1997 +++]

Teeth. Komodo dragon (A-C), crocodile monitor (D-F), Asian water monitor (G-I)

Komodo dragons slash with the teeth, spread infection and pursue their weakened victims. Jennifer S. Holland wrote in National Geographic: “An avid hunter, the Komodo dragon can hit 12 miles an hour in short bursts. The reptiles ambush their prey, ripping open the softest flesh, typically the belly, or maiming a leg. As a backup, dragons do, in a way, breathe fire. Their mouths drip with venomous saliva that keeps blood from clotting — so bite victims bleed out quickly. A wounded victim that gets away is likely to pick up pathogens from watering holes, resulting in infection. Either way, death is almost certain. And dragons can be very patient. [Source: Jennifer S. Holland, National Geographic, January 2014 /=/]

Komodo dragon’s thick, sticky saliva reportedly contains 17 different kinds of bacteria. It was thought that prey died from infection from the saliva or loss of blood not a killing bite. Tour guides tell visitors that there is no known antidote for the bacteria-filled saliva. Researchers have studyied Komodo dragon to see how they protect themselves from germs to develop a new way to fight antibiotic -resistant bacteria.

Komodo dragons can be active hunters They have been observed ambushing deer and pigs by leaping from a thicket and following pregnant goats and seizing newborn kids when they drop to the ground. In some attacks they grab the leg of their prey with their jaws , throw it to the ground and rip open its belly. They have also been observed driving large mammals it into the surf and slashing the tendons of their hind legs. Komodo dragons can be very dangerous if cornered and have been known to rise up on their hind legs before making a lunging attack. Their sharp claws and teeth can inflict severe wounds.

Komodo Dragon Feeding and Drinking

Komodo dragons can smell blood and the scent of death from nearly 10 kilometers away. Male lizards can eat up to 80 percent of their own body weight in one sitting. Komodo dragons have curved, serrated teeth enabling them to bite off large chunks of meat and bone and swallow them whole. They often eat so fast, sometimes consuming large quantities of dirt along with their prey. One scientist saw a 92-pound female eat a 66-pound wild boar in 17 minutes. He also saw another one swallow a month-old fawn whole. There are stories of dragons waiting for pregnant goats to give birth and devouring both the exhausted mother and disoriented kid.

Describing how a Komodo dragon feeds on its victims, Walter Affenberg wrote in "The Behavioral Ecology of the Komodo Monitor," it begins by "ripping open the body wall and pulling out the intestines...followed by the lungs and heart, which are obtained by thrusting the head deep within the chest cavity...The viscera are bolted down rapidly accompanied by a hollow clapping sound produced by the snapping jaws."

Komodo dragon foot and claws

Describing Komodo dragons eating in a pit where tourists gather, David Attenborough wrote, “A large one is fully able to pick up a goat’s carcass with its jaws and drag its body away. If two large ones are feeding on it, they each fasten their jaws on it and rip it apart with backward jerks of their head and shoulders. If younger ones are rash enough to dispute the food with their elders, they are driven away with a lunging rush.”

Komodo dragons will eat their own dead and can expand their mouth cavity considerably allowing them swallow large prey or chunks of meat and whatever else enters their mouth. According to Reuters: “Komodo dragons have appalling table manners but at least they finish their dinners — bones, hoofs and all.” Komodo dragons drink like snakes do by immersing their head up to the eyes and sucking up water. They then raise their head and let gravity take the water from their throat to their stomach. Dragons can also drink when they are fully submerged.

Komodo Dragons Feeding on a Deer

A deer ambushed and bitten by a Komodo dragon typically takes several hours to die. Using its sensitive sense of smell, the dragon tracks down the deer. The lizards have unusually flexible joints between their jaw and skull that allows them to swallow huge chunks of meat. A dragon feeds rapidly, swallowing meat, skin and even bone. After a while, picking up the scent of the carcass, other dragons arrive on the scene. Fighting often occurs among the dragons as they feed. Often times the largest dragon drives off small ones and gorges while the small ones take smaller surreptitious bites. When all the food is consumed the dragons return to their area of the island. [Source:“Beastly Behaviors” by Mark Leigh, Mike Lepine, and Rolf Harris, 1997 +++]

Komodo dragons have sharp, serrated teeth but because they can not chew they tear off pieces of food and throw them backwards into their mouths. The moveable joints in the jaws allow them to open their mouths wide enough to accommodate the entire hindquarter of a small deer, including hair, skin, hooves and bones. Komodo dragons have a high salivation rate which presumably helps the large chunks of flesh slide down their throats.

What happens to the hair, skin, hooves and bones that dragons swallow but can not digest. They form into pellets in the reptiles digestive system and are coughed up. When a dragon senses the pellets are coming, it stands up, arches it neck, shake sit head violently from side to side and shoots out the pellets as it coughs. The peelts can land some distance away and considerably larger then fecal pellets. +++

Komodo Dragon Feeding Behavior

A large kill like a buffalo can provide food for several days with as many as 17 different Komodo dragons feeding a day at different times. At such a kill, according to the book “Beastly Behaviors”: Large Komodo dragons “lord over the choicest pieces of the kill while small monitors perform careful, choreographed dance steps on the outskirts. Males lavish females with attention while sniping at one another with deadly accuracy. These dramas abound because mealtimes are the only times when the normally solitary monitors see one another. They tend to do all their social business: establishing rank, courting and even copulating take place around the dinner table!” [Source:“Beastly Behaviors” by Mark Leigh, Mike Lepine, and Rolf Harris, 1997 +++]

“Monitors have a clear-cut ranking system, (usually based on size), and small monitors are therefore well-versed in how to appease the larger lizards. Before daring to come near, they traverse the outskirts of the circle with a stately ritualized walk that shows that they mean no harm and know their place. With a slow, stiff-legged, stereotyped gait, they throw their body from side to side with exaggerated undulations. They compress their torso laterally, arch their spinal column, and hold their tail up off the ground and straight out behind them. With neck arched and throat inflated, they lower or even cock their head as f tipping their hat to the dominant. Because it is important to hide weaponry, they keep their mouth closed and dare not hiss.” +++

“These appeasement gestures communicate humbleness and the promise that the smaller monitors will wait until the larger one has had its fill of the choicest meat. When the subordinates finally enter the circle, they are nervously attentive to the dominant’s wishes. The slightest move will cause them to bow out of the way and let th dominant pass. Monitors may perform these same appeasement gestures when confronting humans....When Komodo monitors are attacked or handled roughly, they may become so afraid that they disgorge their stomach or intestinal= contents. This happens most often in the few days after a bid meal, when they need a way to slim down before fighting or fleeing.”

Dispelling Myths About Komodo Dragons Hunting and Killing

Previously it was thought the Komodo's mouth harboured virulent bacteria that quickly infected and subdued prey. Brendan Borrell wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, “In 2006, Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at the Queensland Museum, discovered some puzzling fossils in a cave in northeastern Australia, and later confirmed that they were the remains of Komodo dragons that lived 3.8 million years ago. Rather than being the specialized product of island evolution, Hocknull argues, the dragon is really a “generalist carnivore” that feeds on multiple types of prey in a variety of environments. Relatives of the Komodo—monitor lizards that can grow five to six feet long—still live in Australia. [Source: Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013 =]

“One of the biggest misconceptions about the Komodo is that its mouth is full of nasty bacteria that cause deadly lesions in bite wounds, enabling it to take down large prey, including water buffalo. He based the idea on bacteria he’d found in Komodo saliva and the infected wounds he’d observed in horses and water buffalo in western Flores. “An enchanting fairy tale,” says Bryan Fry, a herpetologist at the University of Queensland. “It makes no evolutionary sense.” One problem is that water buffalo were introduced to the region by humans and have never been the dragon’s natural prey. Moreover, the dragons seldom succeed in killing such large animals. Fry says water buffaloes attacked by dragons develop infected wounds from wallowing in filthy water; if they die and become a dragon’s meal, that’s more of a lucky break (for the dragon, not the buffalo) than an evolutionary adaptation. =

“Reptiles aren’t known for brains, but Komodo dragons create dummy chambers with dead ends, thwarting wild pigs and perhaps other, now-extinct scavengers—“the ghost of predation past,” says Tim Jessop, a University of Melbourne ecologist. When the dragons finally hatch, they take to the trees to avoid being eaten by larger dragons. At one point we spotted a tiny dragon that had risked a visit to the ground and was hunting for insects in the leaf litter.” =

Komodo Dragons Kill With Venom Rather Than Bacteria

In 2009 researchers of Komodo specimens published a study that showed the lizards had a well-developed venom gland with ducts that lead to their large teeth. Brendan Borrell wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, “There’s no denying the dragons are effective when they strike smaller prey, such as deer and pigs. Tim Jessop, a University of Melbourne ecologist, who has spent more time studying dragons in the field than anyone since Auffenberg, observed that 70 percent of the prey die within minutes, 20 percent die of blood loss within four hours and only 10 percent survive. [Source: Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013 =]

“Why so lethal? Fry has discovered the secret is the mouth after all—dragons are venomous. When he scanned a dragon’s head with an MRI device, he found in its gums a series of glands that produce venom. It is secreted into the saliva and enters the wound created by the dragon’s sawlike teeth. This venom, Fry has shown, prevents blood clotting and causes muscles around blood vessels to relax, hastening blood loss and leading to a dangerous drop in blood pressure. “This is a sustained march toward unconsciousness,” says Fry. =

“At first glance, the discovery presents an evolutionary enigma. We usually think of venom, whether deployed by a rattlesnake or a scorpion, as a weapon that a small animal uses to kill larger prey, or to protect itself from becoming someone else’s meal. But the dragons aren’t exactly small. The answer, Fry realized after designing a computer model of the dragon’s jaw, was that the animal doesn’t have a strong bite. A saltwater crocodile, whose skull is about the same size, produces 6.5 times more bite force than a dragon. Komodos can barely hold onto prey, preferring to wound, release—and wait. “They grab whatever they can and slice it,” Fry says. =

“Previously, there were only two known venomous lizards: the Gila monster of the American Southwest and the Mexican beaded lizard. Their venoms lower blood pressure and impair coagulation, but also attack muscle tissue and disrupt the nervous system. Fry, having documented vestiges of venom glands in dozens of species, from Chinese crocodile lizards to seasnakes, concludes that the ability to produce venom emerged just once in the evolution of lizards and snakes 170 million years ago. If a species evolved another, perhaps more efficient means of subduing prey—like a rat snake’s constricting embrace—its venom glands atrophied over time, a phenomenon that biologists call a trait loss. The dragon evolved a slimmer skull—a precision cutting instrument—while retaining the venom. The result is a lethal dual-weapons system.” =

Komodo Dragon’s Immune to Their Own Venom and Other Unique Genetic Traits

The saliva of Komodo dragons contains anticoagulants that can cause their prey to bleed out when they bite them. Veronique Greenwood wrote in the New York Times: But when Komodo dragons bite each other, which they do with some frequency, they do not bleed out the way their prey do. That suggests that at some point, they evolved a resistance to their own anticoagulants. It’s one example of the odd batch of traits that have fascinated scientists, including Katherine Pollard, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as a researcher at the Gladstone Institutes. She wondered what the Komodo dragons’ genome would reveal about their biology and evolution. [Source: Veronique Greenwood, New York Times August. 9, 2019]

“In a paper published in August 2019 in Nature Ecology and Evolution, she and her colleagues present the lizards’ genome, revealing evidence of a large number of mutations in important Komodo genes. Their analysis offers insights into the dragons’ blood, senses and other unique aspects of their anatomy. The group cobbled together a draft genome from two dragons living at Zoo Atlanta some years ago, and used tissue from a dragon in the Prague National Zoo to flesh it out. But more recently, Abigail Lind, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Pollard’s lab, focused on the process of interpreting the genome. Using algorithms that helped parse which parts of the sequence coded for proteins, Dr. Lind identified more than 18,000 genes. With the help of other lizard genomes, the researchers made predictions about the genes’ roles. “We wanted to particularly look at different unique traits,” Dr. Pollard said. “The most obvious one is they are gigantic. But there are some other really cool things about them.”

“To look for Komodo genes that had undergone concerted evolution, the researchers pinpointed about 200 with a particularly large number of mutations compared to related species. This pattern suggested that natural selection had favored alterations to those genes, honing them into a form that is specific to the dragons. Many such changes were related to mitochondria, the cellular structures responsible for generating energy. That implied that the dragons may have modified mitochondria to support their sudden bursts of speed. Others represented a family of sensory receptors that have blossomed in number in the dragons, perhaps linked to their uncanny sniffing abilities. Still others encoded numerous proteins involved in blood clotting, suggesting that the dragons may have special genes that allow them to survive their own saliva.

“Additional lab experiments would be required to test how the dragons’ proteins actually work and how their modifications may enable their special abilities. For instance, Dr. Pollard is interested in mixing dragon saliva and blood together in a dish to see what happens. That may take a while, however. “They don’t really want to give up bodily fluids,” she said of the dragons, unless they are anesthetized.

“Surprisingly, the researchers found no particular insights into the lizards’ giant size. There were no obvious changes to genes involved in development and growth, as you might expect if there had been positive selection encouraging their growth. One alternate hypothesis is that enormous size may be an ancestral trait among lizards, and tiny lizards are a more recent development. Perhaps the Komodos are the normal ones, Dr. Pollard speculated, and everyone else, through the eons, has changed.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated February 2025