His neighbors heard the commotion, and ran to his rescue minutes later. Two Komodo dragons were waiting below, and sprang on Anwar. A misstep that sent him falling from the tree proved to be his undoing. In 2009, 31-year-old Muhamad Anwar set out to gather sugar apples from an orchard on Komodo Island. Though in shock, the group rehydrated at the local hospital on Flores Island and celebrated their survival at the town’s Paradise Bar. Finally, an Indonesian rescue crew spotted the diver’s orange emergency floats spread out on the rocks. It chewed at the lead belt while other divers threw rocks at its head, she said, all the while eyeing her bare feet.įor two days and two nights, the traumatized divers contended with dragons and the tropical heat, surviving off of shellfish they scraped from rocks and ate raw. The attacks began almost immediately, the Telegraph reports. A relentless lizard repeatedly came at a Swedish woman, who smacked it with her diving weight belt. They had found their way to Rinca Island, where an estimate 1,300 dragons live. Their troubles, however, were far from over. After spending 10 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. In 2008, a group of SCUBA divers found themselves swept from waters near their boat by the Flores region’s infamously strong current. 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. Safina recalls the boy being bitten in half. While the Guardian writes that the boy died from massive bleeding from his torso, Mr. According to the Guardian, the boy’s uncle came running and threw rocks at the lizard until it released his nephew. Safina recalls the boy’s friends – who had been playing together in the scrubland near their village – rushing to get help from their parents. The dragon lunged when the boy went behind a bush to use the bathroom, MSNBC writes. The attack took place in March’s dry season, so rangers speculate that the murderous lizard may have been particularly hungry given that the watering holes – and the prey that gather there – had dried up. In 2007, a dragon killed an 8-year-old boy on Komodo Island, marking the first fatal attack on a human in 33 years, the Guardian reported. Safina and corroborated by media reports: Here are some of the most infamous attacks, as described by Mr. Though attacks 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. Dragons are not to be taken lightly: male lizards can grow up to 10 feet long, weigh 150 pounds and eat up to 80 percent of their own body weight in one sitting. ( Read Brendan Borell’s dispatch from his trip to Komodo Island, as featured in our special “ Evotourism” issue of Smithsonian magazine.) In recent years, visitors have increasingly flooded this corner of Indonesia, drawn in by the thrill of brushing close to something wild and dangerous. Like so many other tourists, for me, a trip to Indonesia was not complete without a detour to see the world’s largest lizard in its natural habitat. Now, are you ready to go see the dragons?” “No really, they’re actually just baby mangrove markers that tourists bought to restore the forest. On each stick, a date and a foreigner’s name was scrawled in white paint. Safina laughed while gesturing to a row of little wooden crosses stuck in the nearby mud. Standing in front of an assembly line of water buffalo, deer and wild horse skulls – dragon chow – Mr. He’d lived on Rinca – a speck of land off Indonesia’s Flores Island, and one of the five places 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. Safina, a local guide working at Komodo National Park, took a particular relish in describing the way a Komodo dragon’s strong jaws can snap a man’s leg in two. A Komodo dragon lounges near the Komodo National Park welcome center on Rinca Island.
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