:focal(236x124:237x125)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ab/b2/abb288e4-6ca2-4607-a04c-2c5eac10a07b/1_gettyimages-1177993066_web.jpg)
Mr. Safina, a local guide working at Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, took a particular relish in describing to Smithsonian magazine reporter Rachel Nuwer the way a Komodo dragon’s strong jaws can snap a man’s leg in two. He’d lived on Rinca—a speck of land off Flores Island, one of the few places, all in Indonesia, where Komodo dragons reside—his whole life, and he was used to the various horror stories that surfaced every now and then after a tourist wandered off the trail or a kid got ambushed while playing in the bush.
Standing in front of an assembly line of water buffalo, deer and wild horse skulls—dragon chow—Safina laughed while gesturing to a row of little wooden crosses stuck in the nearby mud. On each stick, a date and a foreigner’s name was scrawled in white paint. “Those are tourist graves!” he joked. “No really, they’re actually just baby mangrove markers that tourists bought to restore the forest. Now, are you ready to go see the dragons?”
When our reporter Nuwer took a trip to Indonesia more than a decade ago, she, like many other tourists, felt it would not be complete without a detour to see the world’s largest lizard in its natural habitat. Visitors had increasingly flooded this corner of the island nation, drawn in by the thrill of brushing close to something wild and dangerous.
Since then, tourists wanting to see the predators up close have only increased. But encounters with dragons are not to be taken lightly: The lizards can grow up to ten feet long, weigh more than 150 pounds and eat up to 80 percent of their own body weight in one sitting. Though Komodo dragon attacks on humans are exceptionally rare, they do occasionally occur, mostly when a park guard lets his focus slip for a moment, or a villager has a particularly unlucky day.
But while more and more people want to see the fearsome animal in the wild, the dragon’s numbers have declined. While an expert in the mid-1990s guessed the dragon population was somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 individuals, the most recent estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) puts the number of mature dragons at about 1,380. The dwindling population led that organization to reclassify the species from vulnerable to endangered in 2021. IUCN, which tracks the status of tens of thousands of species, estimated that the Komodo dragon’s suitable habitat would decrease by at least 30 percent in less than half a century. Rising sea levels due to climate change are a main driver of this decline, while outside the dragon’s stronghold in Komodo National Park, human land use will also lead to habitat loss. In many ways, the predator is being backed into an ecological corner.
Gerardo Garcia, a conservation biologist at Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom who has worked on dragon protection efforts in Indonesia, likened the 2021 reclassification to a trip to the emergency room for the species. “If we don’t react quickly, we’re going to have very few animals,” he told the New York Times. “That means you go to intensive care.”
In very rare occurrences—sometimes in the wild and sometimes in zoos—the tables have turned, with the dragons instead putting humans in the hospital. Here are some of the most infamous incidents between people and the lizards, with recent encounters compiled from press reports and interactions before 2013 as described by Safina and corroborated by media reports.
Stopping a dragon fight
In March of this year, two Komodo dragons in the Akron Zoo in Ohio entered the same cage and attacked each other, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. The two male animals were supposed to remain separate—zoo staff had not intended for them to meet. A zoo worker tried to break up the fight and was bitten multiple times by the larger of the two dragons, named Padar, reported Fox59. The smaller dragon, Jasper, did not bite the worker and was injured himself. The zoo did not release many more details about what happened, it said in a statement, due to privacy concerns for the employee.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration later evaluated the zoo’s written procedures, training program and personal protective equipment requirements and found the employee did not violate safety standards. But the zoo did plan extensive follow-up training for its employees after the bites, per Fox59.
After past Komodo dragon-related injuries at zoos—a 34-year-old zookeeper bitten on the hand, a 38-year-old zookeeper also bitten on the hand and a 43-year-old zookeeper bitten on the left forearm and right lower leg—medical researchers have evaluated the bites and published papers on the resulting injuries, to inform future treatments for trauma.
Bitten while building
Four years ago, a construction worker helping to build a resort on Rinca Island in Komodo National Park suffered multiple bites from a dragon and had to be rushed to a hospital by speedboat, according to Vice World News. Elias Agas, 46, was on the job when a Komodo dragon bit him on his right wrist and left leg.
The incident occurred in December 2020, about a month after a photo of a Komodo dragon facing up to a construction truck at the development site on Rinca Island went viral. The Instagram post, which garnered international attention and ignited the hashtag #SaveKomodo, gained more than 280,000 likes. The Indonesian activist who shared the post said he hoped the image would shine a spotlight on the controversial building development.
Referred to as a real-life “Jurassic Park,” the $6.5 million development was proposed as a key place for tourists to view the dragons, with the government saying it would bolster the local economy without jeopardizing the safety of the lizards. (The government also rejected the “Jurassic Park” comparison.) Still, wildlife activists protested against it. A preservationist familiar with the project said both workers and Komodo dragons could be harmed during the work, with the lizards becoming aggressive when they are bothered. “They can’t act normally when they get stressed out,” Aloysius Suhartim Karya, of Tourism Rescue Society Forum, told Vice World News. Less than a year after the incident, Indonesia announced it would move forward with construction of the park.
A dangerous close-up
In May 2017, a 50-year-old tourist from Singapore who was in Indonesia to visit Komodo National Park wanted to capture a close-up picture of dining dragons. So, he ignored warnings from locals and approached the predators as they were feeding on pigs and goats. A dragon responded by biting him on the leg. “He must have been too close,” the park’s head, Sudiyono (who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name), told the Jakarta Post. “A Komodo doesn’t like to be disturbed when eating.”
After receiving initial treatment for wounds, the man was rushed to a hospital by speedboat. The visitor had saved costs by staying with locals for three days, according to Sudiyono, and was frequenting an area not sanctioned for tourist observations. “I also appeal to all tourists to take guides with you when wandering around to see Komodo dragons,” said the park head to the Jakarta Post. “Never risk your safety by staying with locals and watching Komodos without an official guide only for the sake of your budget.”
A tragic playdate
In 2007, a Komodo dragon killed an 8-year-old boy on Komodo Island, marking the first fatal attack on a human in 33 years, the Guardian reported. Rangers speculated that the lizard may have been particularly hungry, given that the local watering holes—and the prey that gather there—had dried up. The dragon lunged when the boy went behind a bush to use the bathroom, the Associated Press wrote.
Safina recalls the boy’s friends—who had been playing together in the scrubland near their village—rushing to get help from their parents. According to the AP, the boy’s uncle came running and threw rocks at the lizard until it released his nephew. While the AP reports that the boy died from massive bleeding from his torso, Safina recalls the boy being bitten in half.
In light of the tragedy, park wardens launched an island-wide hunt for the man-eating lizard, though whether or not these efforts produced results remains unclear.
Shipwrecked with dragons
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b2/a6/b2a6c28c-c6a8-4fa7-a1da-92a8dd678792/2_gettyimages-625197064_web.jpg)
In 2008, a group of scuba divers found themselves swept from waters near their boat by the infamously strong current near Flores Island, the Telegraph reported. After spending ten hours spinning in the tide, around midnight the group washed up on the beach of what seemed like a deserted island, approximately 25 miles from where their ordeal had begun. Their troubles, however, were far from over. They had found their way to Rinca Island, a vital home for the dragons.
The Komodo dragon attacks began soon after. A relentless lizard repeatedly came at a Swedish woman, who smacked it with her diving weight belt, per the Telegraph. It chewed at the lead belt while other divers threw rocks at its head, she said, all the while eyeing her feet.
For two days and two nights, the traumatized divers contended with dragons and the tropical heat, surviving off shellfish they scraped from rocks and ate raw. Finally, an Indonesian rescue crew spotted the divers’ orange and red emergency floats spread out on the rocks. Though in shock, the group rehydrated at the local hospital on Flores Island and celebrated their survival at the town’s Paradise Bar.
Death in the garden
In 2009, 31-year-old Muhamad Anwar set out to gather sugar apples from an orchard on Komodo Island. A misstep sent him falling from a tree and proved to be his undoing. Two Komodo dragons were waiting below and sprang on him. By the time help arrived, Anwar had already suffered fatal injuries and was bleeding from bites to his hands, body, legs and neck, the Guardian reported. Anwar died shortly after the Komodo dragon attack, in a clinic on Flores Island.
Other accounts, however, contest some of these details. CNN reported that Anwar—a fisherman—was actually trespassing on the island and was in an area forbidden for people to enter. This account also reports that Anwar bled to death on the way to the hospital and was declared dead upon arrival.
Dragon under the desk
In 2009, Maen, a Komodo National Park guide like Safina, headed to the staff office on Rinca Island as he would any other morning. Like all the island’s other buildings, Maen’s unit sat on stilts, and hungry dragons would often gather below to wait for the occasional food scrap. On this morning, however, Maen sensed that he was not alone. Having just settled in at his desk, he looked down. At his sandaled feet lay a dragon, peering back up at him.
As it turned out, one member of the cleaning crew had left the office door open the night before, and the hungry predator had crept in, likely in search of food. Heart pounding, Maen attempted to slowly withdraw his leg from the dragon’s vicinity. But he moved too quickly, cueing the motion-sensitive carnivore to lunge. The Komodo dragon chomped down on Maen’s leg, clenching its jaw shut. Maen kicked at the dragon’s neck, then grabbed its jaws with his hands and wrenched its mouth open, slicing open his hand in the process.
Although Maen shouted for help, most of the rangers were in the kitchen and could not hear his screams. Only one picked up on the noise and came to investigate.
“I shouted and he came to help me, but he didn’t like to come up because the dragon was still moving around,” Maen explained to “Time Travel Turtle.” “Then he saw the blood on the floor and he got everyone from the kitchen. All the people come running here, but other dragons follow along as well.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/78/9d/789da668-43d9-4c85-9989-82b376566025/3_gettyimages-687980882_web.jpg)
The dragons, which can smell blood from miles away, followed the crowd. Some rangers fended off the would-be feeding frenzy, while a couple others darted into Maen’s office to help their colleague fight free from the dragon. Maneuvering their injured friend through the pack of Komodo dragons waiting outside, they managed to carry him to the island’s dock, where he was rushed to Flores Island’s hospital. The injuries were too much for the small medical center to contend with, however, and Maen wound up being flown to Bali for six hours of emergency treatment and 55 stitches, “Time Travel Turtle” and NBC reported. All in all, it took him six months to recover from his brush with the dragon.
Despite the encounter, Maen went back to work, although he only stays indoors now so he does not have to deal directly with the animals. “The dragon, I can’t remember which one, he’s still alive,” he told “Time Travel Turtle.” “But I think now he’ll be bigger. If he had a bigger neck then, I couldn’t have hold it open.”
Horror in Hollywood
In 2001, Phil Bronstein, an investigative journalist and editor who was married at the time to actress Sharon Stone, suffered an unfortunate encounter with a Komodo dragon at the Los Angeles Zoo. Stone had arranged a private visit to the zoo’s dragon pen as a surprise present for her husband, who, according to a Time magazine interview with Stone, had always wanted to see a Komodo dragon up close. Once at the dragon’s cage, the zookeeper invited Bronstein in. According to Stone, the zookeeper said of the animal, “It’s very mild mannered. Everybody goes in there. Kids pet him. It’s fine.”
Bronstein went into the dragon’s cage with the zookeeper. The lizard began licking at Bronstein’s white shoes, which the keeper thought must remind the animal of its white rat meals. Following the keeper’s advice, Bronstein removed his shoes and socks to avoid tempting the lizard. Then, as he moved into a better position to take a photo with the animal, it lunged. Bronstein screamed. The predator had the visitor’s foot in its mouth. The Komodo dragon attempted to eat Bronstein’s foot by jerking back and forth. Children gathered around the cage’s glass wall, Stone recalled, taking in the spectacle.
Bronstein managed to wrench the dragon’s jaw’s open and throw it from his foot, then dragged himself out of the cage as the lizard came at him from behind. The top half of Bronstein’s foot was gone, Stone said, and he was covered in scratches from the animal’s lunges. Bronstein survived the incident and did not press charges, though Stone complained that the zoo allegedly continued to allow visits with carnivorous animals following the incident.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Rachel-Nuwer-240.jpg)