Discover Magazine tries to put the record straight, revealing that the supposedly septic-mouthed Komodo dragons have been getting a bad rap:
But of all the terrible tales told about these dragons, none has been so persistent and pervasive than that of their bite. The mouths of Komodos are said to be laden with deadly bacteria from the decaying corpses they feed on, microbes so disgustingly virulent that the smallest bite lethally infects prey. As the story goes, Komodos have turned oral bacteria into a venom.
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It appears that the filthy rumor started with early Komodo biologists in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Esteemed herpetologist Walter Auffenberg spent an entire year on the island of Komodo, watching and tagging the lizards to learn about their ecology. In his book on the subject, he noted that dragons fearlessly tackle animals like water buffalo that can be ten times their size. He also noticed that, often, they would fail to kill these massive prey when they attacked. But that didn’t mean the dragons went hungry — within days of that first bite, many of the bitten buffalo succumbed to sepsis, either dying from bacterial infection or so weakened by it that they were no match for the large lizards.
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This month, the dirty myth of the Komodo’s bite is finally laid to rest, the last nail in the coffin again coming from Bryan Fry [venom researcher and associate professor at the University of Queensland].
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Water buffalo get their name from their affinity for — Surprise! — water. When injured or scared, they flee to the relative safety of the deep. These buffalo aren’t native to the Indonesian islands; they evolved where large, fresh marshes are commonplace. But on the dragon isles, clean water pools are in short supply. The buffalo instead wallow in stagnant, warm water filled with their own feces. These sewage filled holes, says Fry, are breeding cesspits of pathogenic bacteria. “It is when the water buffalo go stand in the toxic water with gaping wounds that they get infected,” he says. “It really has been that simple all along.”
Filthy beef.