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A Little Rest By RiceBelch -- Report

Uploaded: 4 years ago

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Author's Note: Finals screwed me over for the past few weeks. Luckily I made C's on all of them.
Here's a piece after so long (I even did some research of the animal to see how they hunt). ^^'

Summary: After a long day of walking, you decide to rest with a handful of snacks. However, a Komodo dragon intends to interrupt your meal with a treat of his own.

Animal Facts:

"Komodo dragons are the largest living lizards in the world."

"The average size of a male Komodo dragon is 8 to 9 feet and about 200 lbs., according to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, but they can reach a whopping 10 feet (3 meters) in length. Females grow to 6 feet (1.8 m). "

Source: https://www.livescience.com/27402-komodo-dragons.html

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Philosoraptor

Posted by Philosoraptor 4 years ago Report

that was a decent little story and fairly realistic. Since Komodo dragons are rare and well known creatures that live only on a few small islands, it would probably make more sense for the person to have specifically come to this island to see these animals. His phone probably wouldn't work since there would be no tower in that region. Normally visitors would have a ranger accompanying them, but maybe he slipped away on is own, because he didn't want to pay for the service, or just wanted to be alone. I have kept other large monitor lizards as pets for many years, and can say that none of them 'roar' and only hiss when they are angry or annoyed, and not while they are hunting. An 11 foot long Komodo could probably swallow a smaller frame adult human whole so that works too. The venom like saliva wouldn't paralyze a person, but make you very weak. For prey small enough to overpower and swallow whole, they wouldn't even need for the venom to take effect. That is mainly for larger prey like water buffalo. It is interesting that there used to be tiny primitive humanoids called hobbits that lived on the same island as some Komodo Dragons, which must have terrorized them and brought them to extinction. Thanks for sharing!

RiceBelch

Posted by RiceBelch 4 years ago Report

I only based it off some research; since this is a vore story it's going to not be entirely realistic. This is entirely new to me writing about this particular species so i'm still trying to improve. Thanks for reading (and for the info)!

Mechdragon1k

Posted by Mechdragon1k 4 years ago Report

Great fic, I would love to a follow up that covered in details either digestion or escape.

RiceBelch

Posted by RiceBelch 4 years ago Report

Thanks for reading!
I don't know about a follow up, however, but who knows when will that happen. :)

Mechdragon1k

Posted by Mechdragon1k 4 years ago Report

From wiki showing how cool and vorey they are.

Komodo dragons eat by tearing large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole while holding the carcass down with their forelegs. For smaller prey up to the size of a goat, their loosely articulated jaws, flexible skulls, and expandable stomachs allow them to swallow prey whole. The undigested vegetable contents of a prey animal's stomach and intestines are typically avoided. Copious amounts of red saliva the Komodo dragons produce help to lubricate the food, but 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. A small tube under the tongue that connects to the lungs allows it to breathe while swallowing. After eating up to 80% of its body weight in one meal, it drags itself to a sunny location to speed digestion, as the food could rot and poison the dragon if left undigested for too long. Because of their slow metabolism, large dragons can survive on as few as 12 meals a year. After digestion, the Komodo dragon regurgitates a mass of horns, hair, and teeth known as the gastric pellet, which is covered in malodorous mucus. After regurgitating the gastric pellet, it rubs its face in the dirt or on bushes to get rid of the mucus, suggesting it does not relish the scent of its own excretions.


Komodo excrement has a dark portion, which is stool, and a whitish portion which is urate, the nitrogenous end-product of their digestion process.
The largest animals eat first, while the smaller ones follow a hierarchy. The largest male asserts his dominance and the smaller males show their submission by use of body language and rumbling hisses. Dragons of equal size may resort to "wrestling". Losers usually retreat, though they have been known to be killed and eaten by victors. The Komodo dragon's diet is wide-ranging, and includes invertebrates, other reptiles (including smaller Komodo dragons), birds, bird eggs, small mammals, monkeys, wild boar, goats, deer, horses, and water buffalo. Young Komodos will eat insects, eggs, geckos, and small mammals, while adults prefer to hunt large mammals. Occasionally, they attack and bite humans. Sometimes they consume human corpses, digging up bodies from shallow graves. This habit of raiding graves caused the villagers of Komodo to move their graves from sandy to clay ground and pile rocks on top of them to deter the lizards. The Komodo dragon may have evolved to feed on the extinct dwarf elephant Stegodon that once lived on Flores, according to evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond.

The Komodo dragon drinks by sucking water into its mouth via buccal pumping (a process also used for respiration), lifting its head, and letting the water run down its throat.

Saliva
Although previous studies proposed that Komodo dragon saliva contains a variety of highly septic bacteria that would help to bring down prey, research in 2013 suggested that the bacteria in the mouths of Komodo dragons are ordinary and similar to those found in other carnivores. They actually have surprisingly good mouth hygiene. As Bryan Fry put it: "After they are done feeding, they will spend 10 to 15 minutes lip-licking and rubbing their head in the leaves to clean their mouth ... Unlike people have been led to believe, they do not have chunks of rotting flesh from their meals on their teeth, cultivating bacteria." Nor do Komodo dragons wait for prey to die and track it at a distance, as vipers do; observations of them hunting deer, boar and in some cases buffalo reveal that they kill prey in less than half an hour, using their dentition to cause shock and trauma.



Mechdragon1k

Posted by Mechdragon1k 1 year ago Report

Any reason why the stomach acid was glowing?