Today’s Google Doodle involves a 5-question quiz about Komodo dragons. (Click on screenshot to begin the quiz.)
I won! (See below; so did Greg Mayer, who called this to my attention.) You can learn more facts by going on with the Doodle after you get your score. Why a Komodo dragon Doodle today? Because it’s the 37th anniversary of Komodo National Park. I won’t tell you where that is, because it’s the basis of one of the quiz questions.
Report your results below, and I hope all the readers get at least 4 out of 5.
Now that you’ve taken your quiz, you can read about these big lizards ((Varanus komodoensis) here and watch this nice video:
If you want to see one attacking (and killing) a deer, go here.
“They’ve been known to bite people”?
They’ve been known to do a lot more than that!
Yeah. That cracked me up.
“Report your results below”
If I have to :
2/5
Maybe I’m making excuses, but, I took it about 6 hours before this post, and 5 miles bites before coffee. I recall getting angrier during the quiz, impulsively clicking ….
5/5. Can I call myself an expert now!?
5/5! Komodos were one of my obsessions when i was a lad.
5/5 here, with one lucky guess (had no idea about their sense of smell). This all reminds me that I have to go back and see if they’re actually venomous or not, as there still seems to be some debate?
It has fairly recently been found that Komodo’s are indeed venomous. Their venom has been isolated and analyzed and the delivery method has been figured out. Apparently they have a relatively complicated series of ducts and the duct openings are between the teeth, not through the teeth like in snakes.
I can’t remember the details very well but a major affect of the venom is to lower blood pressure leading to shock.
Thank you for clearing that up! I grew up learning that they were indeed venomous, but then at some point I think it was believed that it was simply a septic mix in their mouths of carrion that caused infection? This is the problem with being a scientific dilettante!
That’s pretty much what I remember too. Years ago it was more or less assumed that they were venomous, but I don’t think that assumption was based on anything beyond observing what their bites did to prey.
Then, after some actual study of the dragons themselves it was discovered that they didn’t have any obvious venom delivery system, like hypodermic needle like teeth, but their saliva had all sorts of really nasty bacteria that caused blood poisoning relatively quickly. For at least some years experts were typically saying it was the bacteria in the saliva.
5/5 and guessed on smell too.
Thanks for the information on these “beasties”. Hugs
I missed the one about being a light eater.
So did I. Like most reptiles, their average food intake is low, but, again like most reptiles, they take occasional huge meals. The question is ambiguous.
Ditto. I took ‘light’ to mean infrequent.
4/5 I fell for this one too.
Same here. I figured it was a tricky question. I answered “true” because like most reptiles they probably eat a lot less food in a year than similarly sized warm blooded carnivores eat.
100%; thanks to PBS:Nature.
The islands are beautiful btw. Well worth a visit.
5/5… It might have helped that on episode one of Planet Earth Part 2, there was a good segment on Komodo Dragons.
I was thinking about that as I took the quiz.
Can’t get it to open. Canada??
https://www.google.com/doodles/37th-anniversary-of-komodo-national-park
[5/5!]
Thank you! The doodle was unavailable from Germany.
Also not available in Australia! And we’re much closer to the dragons….
It’s an international dateline problem. I did it yesterday afternoon, Australian time.
5/5 First learned of them at the San Diego Zoo as a kid.
4/5. Wrong guess on food requirements.
5 for 5. They’re just snakes that haven’t “made it” yet..
4/5, got a wrong answer on the one about smell.
The segment recently on Planet Earth II was superb indeed, though they’ve been on similar documentaries before, equally fantastic (was it Life, or the first Planet Earth, that also featured them?).
I first became hooked on David Attenborough at the age of nine, watching Zoo Quest for a Dragon on BBC (the one and only channel available then). I remember being bitterly disappointed that when they found it, it didn’t have wings, and couldn’t breath fire. 🙁
BTW, if you follow the link, you can watch all six 30 minute episodes featuring a very young (but unmistakable) David Attenborough, back in his black and white days.
5 out of 5, but I’m going to skip the deer
feeding video.
Well of course I aced the quiz, I love Bob & Ray.
https://archive.org/details/KomodoDragonExpertGabePrestonPhonesIn
+1
Love the “carnivoree”.
5 for 5, like a good game for Rod Carew
5/5 – did it yesterday evening.
(1) I would not be squatting next to one like the guy in the video – that’s kind of like Steve Irwin and the crocs.
(2) There’s something I saw recently on Komodo blood. Part of the problem with Komodo bites, as I understand it, is not just the venom but a nasty collection of oral bacteria. But Komodos bite each other, and yet don’t get infected. Apparently the blood contains peptides that prevent the infection. But the science was behind a paywall and all I saw was abstracts and pop-science bits. Maybe someone knows more.
Cellular peptide cake anyone?
According to the picture, a Komodo dragon can detect a durian at 10km. Hell, I can do that!
5/5, what I find fascinating is that they are thought to have preyed on dwarf mammoths in earlier days…
What were the questions? There is no komodo doodle today, and the doodle link recursively takes me back to a pristine google page, where I curse and recurse.
Thanks to Torbjörn Larsson’s link above, I was able to complete the quiz. I got 110% – believe me.
Having overnights on Komodo years ago, I can tell you that they are among the wonders of the animal world. When visiting, be careful. Years ago at least one straying German tourist was actually eaten by one of these giant lizards.
Couldn’t seem to get at the quiz, but I did learn something interesting (to me anyway) a few months ago in a MOOC course about the ‘hobbit’. Really homo floresiensis, and the not big island of Flores has the smaller Komodo Island nearby. I learned that the dragons were not just on that last island, but had been widespread on Flores, and still existed there in 2 or 3 pockets along the north shore.
I wonder which, the hobbits or the dragons, ate more of the other one?
I love Kimodo dragons but I can’t take the quiz because google keeps redirecting me to the Canadian Google! }:<
Diana, try this.
http://google.com/ncr
The /ncr is supposed to stand for “no country redirect”.
However I have tried it too, but there is no komodo doodle today.
The /ncr suffix seems to work for some other domains too.
Thanks, that got me to google.com but sadly no Komodo dragon fun. 🙁
Thanks!
5/5
Because my son used to lecture me about this sort of stuff when he was 6.
5/5
5/5. I’ve been fond of Komodo dragons since I was young, but I wouldn’t want to cuddle one! They apparently have a number of anti-microbial peptides in their saliva or blood that are being considered for potential development of new antibiotics. (I forget where I read that recently).
See, now, I was sure they were going to say they weren’t lizards, so I got the first wrong.
Got 4/5 but I don’t consider myself to be 80% of an expert – some (educated) guesswork involved.
I was excited when I first saw the doodle because I thought it was celebrating Tiktaalik. I can see now it’s not quite right (too many legs for one thing).
An esteemed colleague, who I hope will weigh in with his own comment on the matter, disputed the veracity of one of the answers, insisting the dragons were not hostile, and that he himself had seen their keepers gently scratching them atop their scaly heads. My reply to him was that, yes, they can be quite calm around their keepers, but the guy in the doodle was clearly a tourist, and tourists are hard to tell from deer. I’ve heard stories of people on the island being killed, but I’m not sure how credible they are.
It’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and that’s well known in the zoo community. And as for the Google drawing, well, that may be so, but the question was straightforward: are KDs gentle. And I say they are! Or they can be!
What is it with Australians and tempting large carnivorous animals?