Komodo Island Is Closing to Tourists Because People Are Stealing Dragons
travelandleisure.com
travelandleisure.com
Anyone curious should check out this amazing gallery of pics/videos and captions that really blew my mind and totally changed my perception of this fearsome lizard!
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/b8joz9/komodo_island_...
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/RUeB9 (credit: theitinerantnaturalist on imgur)
These are scary animals! They do look cool though
Warning to those who want to watch : it is horrible, and I just watched a few seconds. Really, don't watch it if you can't see nature in its most raw form
Sounds to me like they should be farming these things. 100 animals is 3.5 million. Not a bad way to make money.
Unless say,you were trying to put one in a bag. Also they don't need to hang on to you to kill you like a croc does.
What are you basing this on?
Related to the bacteria/saliva myth are misconceptions on how they hunt. They often eat their prey alive in a very brutal manner[3], rather than biting them once then hanging back for their prey to die. They also have exceptional endurance by reptile standards. Crocodilians are known for very rapid burst speed, but monitor lizards and particularly Komodo dragons can chase prey at very high speeds for much longer than you'd expect[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#Saliva
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/06...
That's incorrect.
>In 1969, Walter Auffenberg came along and made his detailed study of Komodo dragon behaviour. He made two critical observations:
>1) Komodo dragons can kill large prey, occasionally even buffalo, outright.
>2) buffalo that escape a Komodo dragon attack often die of infection.
>Auffenberg, based on the second observation, hypothesized that the dragon had septic saliva and used it to kill large prey slowly over days or weeks, even though his own published field observations contradicted this. The public caught wind of this idea, and the myth of the Komodo dragon as a slow killer with a virulent bacterial brew was born.
>Then, in the 21st century, Dr. Bryan Fry discovered the presence of modified salivary glands in the dragon's lower jaw. The compound produced by these glands proved to be a potent anticoagulant.
>Dr. Fry believed that this substance was venom, since many types of snake venom also cause uncontrollable bleeding. He also recognized that Komodo dragons kill prey quickly rather than over a long time, since he actually observed these animals hunting. Unfortunately, the press totally missed that last bit, so the myth lived on in modified form, with venom replacing bacteria.
>The original venom hypothesis has come under fire recently (Hargreaves et al, 2015), and many scientists now believe the anticoagulant is a digestive enzyme. There are many reasons to indicate that venom doesn't play a role when killing prey, which certainly fits with the observations of Komodo dragons killing prey violently and swiftly.
>In 2013, another study revealed that there was no septic bacteria in the Komodo dragon's maw. In fact, it has a cleaner mouth than most mammals due to constantly replacing its teeth, leaving no chance for trapped food to rot and fester before they fall out along with the dentition.
>It is a fact that Komodo dragons do not wait for prey to die, even though this myth is still being presented as true by pop culture. What really happens in these cases is something else entirely: prey escapes, gets infected, dies, and is eaten by a dragon (possibly the same one if it happens to be nearby). There is never any intent by the dragon to kill its prey in this way. They try to kill quickly, in some cases even near-instantaneously, and usually in just a few minutes.
[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/RUeB9
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/b8joz9/komodo_island_...
Then in the afternoon they start running around and the rangers use the sticks to keep them away.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLxRAcBYhKE
> ...swallowing is still a long process (15–20 minutes to swallow a goat). A Komodo dragon may attempt to speed up the process by ramming the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat, sometimes ramming so forcefully, the tree is knocked down
Jesus, they're mental.
This is actually a common problem in Mexico: "They [drug lords] like charismatic animals that symbolise power and strength: big cats such as lions, tigers and jaguars, along with big snakes, monkeys and nice looking birds," [1]
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/indepth/features/2011/09/20119...
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/worlds-deadliest/...
I hear the same argument about ivory poachers being poor people faced with no other choice but it's simply not true, the amount of money gained from killing one animal is 20 years salary, it's not a choice between going hungry or not.
How stupid someone has to be to steal someone's food day in day out (and eventually get caught, beaten or worse) when they can "steal" something that belongs to no individual and get away with it?
If the animals actually had a private owner, poachers would mostly get caught and the island wouldn't be closed to tourists.
At least that's how it works in India (Sandalwood, ivory etc.,) so I'm guessing this is standard modus operandi across the world.
The point I'm trying to make is, ivory poachers are indeed poor people. However, the amount of money they make from killing one animal is good enough for a week or month's worth of living. Nowhere near 20 years salary. So they are driven by hunger.
The bigger players, politicians, corporations are the ones driven by greed. The movie Blood Diamond is quite accurate IMO.
It could be that you have—in theory at least—two options:
1) Try to plant corn. 2) Kill a rhino.
There is no option here that makes exactly $3 or whatever is may be that your food need is for that timestamp.
I think he means "people got to eat" as in you need some kind of income.
How is killing chicken not worse than capturing lizards?
Then you can fund conservation. It would create an economic incentive for protection, since all parties would want to keep the cash cow alive (instead of this being more of a PR issue, which is how conservation is treated)
In the US, much of national conservation came from hunting. Bullet taxes pay for it.
It's a shame conversations about cold hard realities are driven by ideals and feelings and not trade offs.
There is nothing without pros and cons. It's just a matter of picking your poising. Most people don't want to think about that. So we get ruthless manipulators to sway masses. The masses meanwhile are adamant about making decisions and having a voice... while completely ignoring the reality out there. They want decisions made from the vantage point of what they feel with no real care about the real world consequences of what they choose.
"Keep the cash cow alive" is indeed a good incentive but we have many historical examples of businesses valuing short-term income or success over long-term reliability. You need look no further than Facebook Games (where the big players basically destroyed the viability of a genre entirely, and knowingly did so - there are quotes from high-level Zynga leads on this) or the dust bowl to realize how short-sighted people can be.
It would be great if this could be executed in a way that helps the local economy and preserves the ecosystem, though.
My post says: we have two options (ideals or pragmatism) and a bunch of people focusing on ideals while the world burns.
To hear a response focus on ideals proves that for most emotions < real life. There are real world options, being used right now. With pros and cons. That are known. But it means taking a cold hard look at things, not feeling good about 'protecting' in an ineffective manner.
The ranger's carry a long branch with a fork in it to defend themselves (by catching the dragon's neck in the fork). Dragons are smart enough to catch things like goats, so they are a danger to adult humans - more by sneaking up rather than a frontal attack.
Wouldn't be too much of a challenge to take one unfortunately. They're usually quite hungry (lots of them hang around the rangers' hut waiting to be fed), so setting a trap with a piece of meat in it would work with little danger to the operator if they were careful.
Apparently the cell which grows into the baby dragon is formed from an ordinary egg cell that duplicates each of its chromosomes rather than having a second set of chromosomes provided by a male sperm cell, as in sexual reproduction. It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
I believe this means that the offspring are thus completely homozygous, though not clones of their mother because the egg chromosomes were formed by the usual meiosis. Even more amazing (I think) is that there are apparently some boa snakes which can also reproduce via parthenogenesis but whose sex determination system makes all offspring female. IIUC, if any of these daughters were also to reproduce via parthenogenesis, then their offspring would indeed be clones of their mothers. A sort of genetic end point.
> It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
Do you mean when it is not parthenogenenis? How does this work?
EDIT: these are some of the snakes that I think it has been (partially) documented for:
Copperhead
Fur de Lance
Some types of rattlesnakes
Burmese Pythons
Reticulated Pythons
> Do you mean when it is _not_ parthenogenenis? How does this work?
I mean all Komodo offspring produced by parthenogenenis are male even though offspring from usual sexual reproduction in Komodos can be either gender. The reason is that the Komodo sex determination system is logically opposite to that of mammals. Specifically, whereas in mammals, a pair of homologous sex chromosomes XX, produces a female, in Komodos this produces a male, ZZ. (Parthenogenenis means there is also the possibility of Komodo WW embryo but these are not viable.)
Happy to hear someone else thinks this is interesting.
So that means that the female will have ZW, but it would double its Z_1 and give its offspring Z_1Z_1?
#Komodoisopen https://wickeddiving.com/2019/04/komodo-is-open/
This is true of the general populace and all of us. We might not be stealing dragons, but bit by bit each of us contribute negatively.
Eventually we will have to police one-another, be it through Government or through societal change and pressure.
But I guess this is what happens with all services when they start to get "main-stream" and start to become diluted by the masses. Without sounding too elitist, it's not all too terrible but you can see the difference between older posts comments and new.
There's always at least 1 post hanging in a top that is about "You don't really need X", which really says "If you're going to keep doing next 5 years what you've been doing last 5 years, don't bother", which as I suspect some read as "Relax, you don't need to bother about this tech, just memorise a few sentences to sound smart if asked about".
It's HN. There's something new? Cool! You managed to serve 1000s users per second from linode $20 node? Awesome! How? What tradeoffs you had to do and where? You have a good idea on how to better make choices about your tech and created some nice decision tree chart? Thank you. Hope it's on github, we'd like to collaborate.
The people of Flores went on had a meeting with Vice President after rumors started about Komodo closing down, earlier this year. It is fake, it is not true! Marta Muslin says after meeting Mr Jusaf Kala the Vice President of Indonesia