No-one’s Ark: Komodo Dragon
IUCN Status: Vulnerable
This is an extract from Human Nature: How to be a Better Animal, part of Chapter 6’s list of ten animals that I would choose to save first.
Indonesia is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, so it’s hardly surprising we should find Earth’s most impressive reptile amidst its species-rich islands. Reaching 3 metres in length and weighing as much as you or I, the Komodo dragon is as close as we’ve come to finding a living dinosaur. They can smell blood up to 4km away, and inject 5 separate toxins in their venom when they bite. Victims experience painful cramping, loss of body heat, blood thinning, heightened pain sensitivity, excessive bleeding, shock and unconsciousness in no particular order. So it’s no great surprise that we’re wary of the creatures.
In 2013, a Komodo dragon walked into a ranger’s hut. What ensued was not a joke. The people inside were caught completely off guard, and the dragon promptly bit the ranger and another member of staff before the situation could be brought under control. Both were evacuated to hospital for treatment, though fatalities are rare. Since records started in 1974, over thirty attacks on people by the dragons have been recorded, five of them proving fatal. And with the tourism industry booming off the back of our morbid attraction to the creatures, habituated Komodo dragons are becoming an ever-greater threat.
They are a perfect example of why conservation is so hard. Local communities have lived with the dragons for centuries, learning to coexist and fending away the reptiles with nothing more than sturdy forked sticks. Dragons naturally hunt deer and the occasional water buffalo, so humans were a fleetingly rare feature on the menu. Komodo dragons were everywhere but people were few and far between, so conflict could be avoided. In the early 20th century, Europeans discovered the dragons for the first time, and it didn’t take long for the trickle of visiting naturalists to turn into a flood of excited foreigners vying for a glimpse of the beasts. Recently the local airport was upgraded, with its capacity increasing tenfold to allow 1.5 million visitors annually to the region.
On the face of it, this shouldn’t have been too difficult to manage. Rare cases of dangerous dragons known for attacking humans were countered by relocating the problem lizards to a remote, smaller island away from the main island of Komodo. Except that tourists have started to go further afield, and are now using this island too. It’s a bit like Jurassic Park being rediscovered by a group on a school trip- something’s bound to go wrong.
The area is a World Heritage Site, placing the local government under extra pressure to ensure it’s well conserved. And long before COVID came along, plans were formed to close the main island of Komodo to tourists for 2020. After much to and fro, the plans were dropped. Local communities were desperate for the revenue tourism brought; dragon populations overall seemed relatively stable; and, though prey items such as deer were in decline, more concerted efforts to monitor and manage their population could easily remedy the shortage.
What the right answer might be, nobody can say. But the complexity of the situation, balancing human and wildlife needs, is common across modern environmental management practice. And there’s never just one problem to look at. A growing threat from the illegal wildlife trade has been noted, with as many as 41 Komodo dragons being smuggled through transactions on Facebook. How they were caught and shipped off is anyone’s guess, but each of the dragons sold for over $30,000. Authorities must adapt constantly to meet these changing threats, and the current dragon population of several thousand is a testament to their success.
The Komodo dragon aboard my ark attests to the trying complexity of modern conservation, and to the awe we feel towards other living creatures. Protecting such animals results in far-reaching benefits for all involved, provided they can juggle both respect for nature’s power and tenderness in accomodating it.
