KOMODO DRAGONS

This is Stephen V. Cole Posting: I was watching a TV show about these huge lizards, which live in a national park on a few islands in Indonesia. I have seen one in a US zoo (only a handful of zoos have them) but it was only a baby and three feet long. Komodos reach full size in ten years (that being 10 feet long and 150 pounds). Sometime past age 40, they get old and slow and cannot fight for food any more and slowly starve to death by age 50. During these senior years, they tend to enter human villages looking for an easy meal. It seems to me that there is an opportunity here. Scientists constantly monitor these dragons by individual names and records, and once they see one getting old, he (or she) could be humanely trapped and shipped off to a zoo, where (given plenty of food) the Komodo dragon could live a dignified decade or two as an attraction that the public would pay to see. This would bring huge full-size Komodos to every zoo in America and Europe, allowing more people to see them, and allow these old lizards to have a much more dignified "senior" period that would probably last longer. It's got to be better than watching these old dragons get beaten up by younger dragons and slowly starve to death.

SPP adds: And it would allow the young ones to grow up in the wild rather than being snaked off to a zoo, which might in turn help perpetuate the species by allowing the strongest to procreate. You never know how important that you grabbed for the zoo was to their gene pool.