Watch a Komodo dragon attack a 1,200-pound buffalo - then follow it until the animal dies

These immensely sharp teeth can slash their prey's skin, muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. They can eat up to 80% of their body weight in one sitting. Komodo dragons live on only five islands in southeastern Indonesia. Indonesia's four islands within Komodo National Park and the island of Flores. These are islands of stark contrast. Much of the area is dry, rugged, and rocky, with thorny vegetation. However, there are also dense forests, mangroves, and patches of greenery, especially in the valleys and coastal areas. And in all of this, the Komodo dragon thrives. They can be found sunbathing on the jagged rocks, sleeping up in trees, and occasionally swimming between the islands. Scientists think Komodo dragons originated in Australia and migrated to Indonesia thousands of years ago. As larger predators went extinct, they became the dominant predator on these isolated islands. And for a long time, people in the western world considered them to be mythical creatures. For decades, stories of giant lizards inhabiting the Komodo Islands circulated, making them seem like legendary beasts, similar to the dragons in folklore. It wasn't until 1910 that western scientists finally confirmed their existence. And though they might not be mythical dragons, they're a creature you would not want to contend with. Komodo dragons typically weigh about 70 kg or 155 lbs and measure around 2.5 m long. But the largest verified specimen reached a length of 3.13 m or 10.3 ft and weighed 166 kg or 366 lbs. But despite being a top predator, a Komodo Dragon's bite force is relatively low. This might seem surprising, but a Komodo Dragon isn't killing by crushing, it's killing by shredding. Despite what looks like a gummy smile at first glance, a Komodo Dragon has 60 curved teeth, each up to an inch long. These teeth are razor sharp, serrated, and built for tearing flesh. The serrations along the edges help them saw through the meat efficiently, allowing them to rip large chunks from their prey. They might get damaged, but these teeth are constantly replaced throughout their lifetime. And if you look closely at their teeth, you'll notice the edge of them is orange. Scientists recently realized that the cutting edges and tips of the teeth have concentrated amounts of iron, which gives it that color. This thin coating of iron acts as a protective layer that keeps the serrated edges of their teeth sharp. These immensely sharp teeth can slash their prey's skin, muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. Often, this is enough to kill their prey instantly. For smaller prey up to the size of a goat, they can loosen their jaws like a snake and swallow it whole. They can eat up to 80% of their body weight in one sitting. That would be like me eating 150 quarter pounders at once. Because of their slow metabolism, large dragons only need around one meal per month. After eating this massive meal, the lizard drags itself into a sunny location to speed digestion. And then it does something exceedingly gross. After it's done digesting, the Komodo dragon regurgitates a mass of horns, hair, and teeth known as a gastric pellet, which is covered in a rancid slime. That picture doesn't look that bad, but trust me, it's wild. I'm not going to show a clip because it's pretty gross and I don't want to get demonetized, but if you want to see it and other uncensored Komodo clips, head over to Nebula to watch that version of the video. But for some of the Komodo dragon's other prey, eating it in one gulp is not possible. buffalo weigh around 550 kilograms or 1200 pounds. No Komodo dragon is even big enough to take one down outright. In fact, the water buffalo has a 100% escape rate from the Komodo dragon after a bite. But here is where the Komodo dragon mystery really begins. After the initial bite, the water buffalo will wander off and die a few days later. So how exactly is the water buffalo being killed. For years, scientists believed the Komodo dragon's drooly mouth was full of nasty bacteria that would enter the wound of the prey animal, dealing the final blow. I know I was taught this, and in fact, when you try to do research on this subject, this is still often repeated. So the whole idea of bacteria as a weapon comes down to a 1980 book published by Offenberg. This is Brian Fry, Professor of Toxicology in the Adaptive Biotoxicology Lab at the University of Queensland. Early in the book, he describes seeing the occasional water buffalo getting infected and then that's the last you hear of it until the end of the book, where he postulates this idea of bacteria being used as a weapon, but absolutely no data in between, nothing to support this. And it was seized on and ran from there, it became this enchanting fairy tale. But there's a very simple premise in science that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And bacteria being used as a weapon is as extraordinary of a claim as you could possibly make. Now, if you look at a dragon, and even in Offenburg's own descriptions, he describes the dragons as actually being quite fastidious in their eating, where after they've had a meal, they'll lick their lips and rub their head in the leaf litter and clean themselves up quite a bit. And if you look at their mouth, the teeth are white and shiny and the gums are pink and clean. There's no rotting flesh hanging off of them. This is to say that Komodo dragons are much cleaner than you would think. And then there's the fact that potent antimicrobials have been isolated from Komodo dragon blood serum. So Komodos have actually a very powerful immune system. You can't have it both ways. You can't have them farming bacteria and also being highly resistant to bacteria at the same time. So it made no sense. But this is not to say the water buffalo aren't getting infected, but it's not for the reason you'd think. So like on Rincha, for example, the water buffalo are localized to just a few small valleys, and the only water source available to them are these rocky watering pools that for most of the year are stagnant. So they get filled with feces and then boiled in the tropical sun. And I remember the first time we went to the islands, I could smell these watering holes from like two to three or even 400 meters away. I mean, they reek. You know, they're basically sewage ponds. And I remember as we were going to them, I was like, oh, I've got some cuts on my legs, you know, from a little boating accident. You know, I better make sure to stay away from the water. And I had one of those little light bulb moments like, no, it can't be that simple all this time. So maybe the long fabled lethal Komodo dragon bacteria was really just poop water all along. And this makes sense, Because any time a water buffalo feels threatened by a predator, it bails into the water, hence the name. And normally this would be a better strategy for them, but water buffalo are not native to these small Indonesian islands. So in the marshes of Southeast Asia, the marshes are clean because the water buffalos are living in these giant marshes. And when they defecate, that just gets broken down by the plants and all the other processes in the water. So they flee into clean water. But in Komodo, they flee into water with these gaping wounds that they're fleeing basically into warm sewage. And any infection that's going to happen has nothing to do with the Komodos. It just has to do with the fact that the water buffalo is introduced to an island they don't belong to and encountering a predator that they didn't evolve with. So they do get occasionally infected, but that has nothing to do with the Komodo. And it's unlikely that the Komodos are intentionally using this to their advantage, since water buffalo were only introduced to their habitat 300 years ago. It seems to just be incidental. Fry and his colleagues even studied the bacterial load in the Komodo's mouth to quantitatively assess the possibility of the long-standing bacteria theory. So we studied a number of Komodos, including captive Komodos and including baby Komodos as they hatch from the eggs. The LA Zoo was super cool and let us sample the animals as they were hatching, swallowing their mouths before they even had their first drink of water. But what was fascinating about that study was that we showed that they have actually lower bacteria levels than a tazzy devil, a lion, or your average dog, or even your average, you know, three-year-old kid chewing on their classmate's ankle. But even so, you still see on nature documentaries them talking about bacteria. Some of the guides in Komodo even still talk about bacteria, even though we disproved this, you know, over 10 years ago. But what's particularly fascinating about everything was that Offenburg, in his own book, actually, without realizing it, provides the first evidence for venom. Venom. Could this actually be the Komodo Dragon's secret weapon? And if so, shouldn't it be pretty obvious? So if you read the book, they did some horrible, absolutely despicable experiments that were that were getting thrown in jail nowadays, where they tied goats to trees, let Komodo dragons tear into them, chase the dragons off, and then just sat down and watched what happens to the goats. And they described that even like with their intestines halfway hanging out, the goats were unusually quiet, seemed to be almost like they were sedated, rapidly went into shock, displayed gait problems like they were dizzy or had some sort of neuromuscular issue. They said they bled much longer than we expected them to, more than you would expect from the mechanical damage alone. They just let the goat slowly bleed out over the next few hours. There was no clonting observed. Could this actually be the Komodo dragon's secret weapon? And if so, shouldn't it be pretty obvious? So if you read the book, they did some horrible, absolutely despicable experiments that were getting thrown in jail nowadays where they tied goats to trees, let Komodo dragons tear into them, chased the dragons off, and then just sat down and watched what happens to the goats. And they described that even like with their intestines halfway hanging out, the goats were unusually quiet. You know, it seemed to be almost like they were sedated, rapidly went into shock, displayed gait problems like they were dizzy or, you know, had some sort of neuromuscular issue. They said they bled much longer than we expected them to, more than you would expect from the mechanical damage alone. They just let the goats slowly bleed out over the next few hours, there's no claunting observed.