 About About Bali and the Komodo Dragons
It is hoped that on every cruise at some point we will be able to go ashore at Komodo Island itself and be able to observe this fabled animal in the flesh. Please find below an article that answers many people questions about the Komodo Dragon. Text adapted from "Scientific American" article - Author: Claudio Cioffi  The first question usually asked about Komodo Dragons is, how big do they get? A robust mature, male Komodo, is about 2.5 meters long and weights 45 kilograms. The largest verified specimen reached a length of 3.13 meters and was purported to weigh 166 kilograms. More typical weights for the largest wild dragons are about 70 kilograms; captives are often overfed and overweight. Although the Komodo can run briefly at speeds up to 20 kmh, its hunting strategy is based on stealth and power. It spends hours lying motionless, waiting to pounce on a deer, board, goat or anything edible passing by.Monitors can see objects as far away as 300 meters, so vision does play a role in hunting, though their eyes are better at picking up movement than at discerning stationary objects. Their retinas possess only cones, so they may be able to distinguish color but have poor vision in dim light. Despite a mention in the first scientific paper reporting its existence that dragons appeared to be deaf, later research revealed this belief to be false - the animal does hear, but in a restricted range, probably between about 400 and 2,000 hertz. (Humans hear frequencies between 20 and 20,000 hertz.) This limitation stems from varanids having but a single bond, the stapes, for transferring vibrations from the tympanic membrane to the cochlea, the structure responsible for sound perception in the inner ear. Mammals have two other bones working with the stapes to amplify sound and transmit vibrations accurately. In addition, the varanid cochlea, though the most advanced among lizards, contains far fewer receptor cells than the mammalian version. The result is an animal that is insentient to such sounds as a low-pitched voice or a high-pitched scream. Vision and hearing are useful, but the Komodo Dragon's sense of smell is its primarily food detector. Its long, yellow forked tongue samples the air, after which the two tongue tips retreat to the roof of the mouth, where they make contact with the Jacobsonâs organs. These chemical analyzers ãsmellä by recognizing airborne molecules. The concentration present on the left tongue tip is higher than that sampled from the right, telling the Komodo that prey is to be found on the left. This system, along with an undulatory walk where the head swings from side to side, helps the dragon sense the direction of odoriferous carrion from as far away as four kilometers, when the wind is right. The Komodo makes its presence known when it is about one meter from its intended victim. The quick movement of its feet sound like a ãmuffled machine gun,ä according to Walter Auffenberg, who has contributed more to our knowledge of Komodo than any other researcher. Auffenberg, a herpetologist at the University of Florida lived in the field for almost a year starting in 1969 and returned for briefer periods in 1971 and 1973. He summed up the bold, bloody and resolute nature of the Komodo assault by saying, ãWhen these animals decide to attack, thereâs nothing that can stop them.ä That is, while nothing can stop them from their attempt, most predator attacks are unsuccessful. The difficulties in observing large predators in dense vegetation turn some quantitative records into best estimates. It is informative that one Komodo followed by Auffenberg for 81 days has only two verified kills, with no evidence of the number of unsuccessful attempts.
Its tooth serrations harbor bits of meat from the Komodo Dragon's last meal, either fresh prey or carrion. This protein-rich residue supports large numbers of bacteria. In the saliva researchers have found some 50 different bacterial strains, at least seven of which are highly septic. If the prey somehow maneuvers away and escapes, chances are that its victory will be short-lived. Infections resulting from the Komodo bite will probably kill it within one week; its attacker, or more likely other Komodo Dragons, will then consume the corpse. The Komodo bit is not deadly to another Komodo, however. Dragons wounded in battle appear to be unaffected by these otherwise deadly bacteria. The muscles of the Komodo Dragon's jaws and throat allow it to swallow huge chunks of meat with astonishing rapidity: Auffenberg once observed a female who weighted no more than 50 kilograms consume a 31 kilogram boar in 17 minutes. Several moveable joints, such as the intramandibular hinge that opens the lower jaw unusually wide, help in the bolting. The stomach expands easily, enabling an adult to consume up to 80 percent of its own body weight in a single meal, which most likely explains some exaggerated claims for immense weights in captured individuals. Large mammalian carnivores, such as lions, tend to leave 25 to 30 percent of their kill unconsumed, declining to eat the intestines, hide, skeleton and hooves. Komodo Dragons eat much more efficiently, forsaking only about 12 percent of the prey. They eat bones, hooves and swaths of hide. They also eat intestines, but only after swinging them vigorously to scatter their contents. This behavior removes feces from the meal. Because large Komodo Dragons cannibalize young ones, the latter often roll in fecal material, thereby assuming a scent that their bigger brethren are programmed to avoid consuming. Although males tend to grow larger and bulkier than females, no obvious morphological differences mark the sexes. One subtle clue does exist: a slight difference in the arrangement of scales just in front of the cloaca, the cavity housing the genitalia in both sexes. While sexing Komodo Dragons remains a challenge to researchers, the dragons themselves appear to have little trouble figuring ;out who is who. With a group assembled around carrion, the opportunity for courtship arrives.
The victorious wrestler initiates courtship by flicking his tongue on a femaleâs snout and then over her body. The temple and fold between the torso and the rear leg are favorite spots. Stimulation is both tactile and chemical, through skin gland secretions. Before copulation can occur, the males must evert a pair of hemipenes located within his cloaca, at the base of the tail. The male then crawls on the back of his partner and inserts one of the two hemipenes, depending on his position relative to the femaleâs tail, into her cloaca. The females Komodo will lay her eggs in September. The delay in laying may serve to help the clutch avoid the brutally hot months of the dry season. In addition, unfertilized eggs may have a second chance with a subsequent mating. The female lays in depressions dug on hill slopes or within the pilfered nests of megapode birds. These chicken-size land dwellers make heaps of earth mixed with twigs that may reach a meter in height and three meters across. While the eggs are incubating, females may lie on the nests, protecting their future offspring. No evidence exists, however, for parental care of newly hatched Komodo Dragons. The hatchlings weight less than 100 grams and average only 40 centimeters in length. Their early years are precarious, and they often fall victim to predators, including their fellow Komodo Dragons. They feed on a diverse diet of insects, small lizards, snakes and birds. Should they live five years, they can weight 25 kilograms and stretch two meters. long. By this time, they have moved on to bigger prey, such as rodents, monkeys, goats, wild boars and the most popular Komodo food, deer. Slow growth continues throughout their lives, which may last more than 30 years. Komodo Dragons, as members of the class Reptilia, do have a relationship with dinosaurs, but they are not descended from them as is commonly believed. Rather Komodo Dragons and dinosaurs share a common ancestor. Both monitor lizards and dinosaurs belong to the sub-class Diapsida, or ãtwo-arched reptiles,ä characterized by the presence of two openings in the temporal region of the skull. The earliest fossils from this group date back to the late Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago. Two distinct lineages arose from those early representatives. One is Archosauria, which included dinosaurs. The ancestor of monitor lizards, in contrast, stemmed from primitive Lepidosauria at the end of the Paleozoic era, about 250 million years ago. Whereas some dinosaurs evolved upright stances, the monitor lineage retained a sprawling posture and developed powerful forelimbs for locomotion. During the Cretaceous, and starting 100 millions years ago, species related to present day varanids appeared in central Asia. Some of these were large marine lizards that vanished with the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago. Others were terrestrial forms, up to three meters in length, that preyed on smaller animals and probably raided dinosaur nests. About 50 million year ago, during the Eocene, these species dispersed throughout Europe and south Asia and even into North America. Through comparisons of DNA sequences and chromosomal structure of varanid species and related families, researchers have concluded that the genus originated between 40 and 25 million years ago in Asia. Varanids reached Australia by about 15 million years ago, thanks to a collision between the Australian landmass and southeast Asia. Numerous small varanid species, known as pygmy monitors, quickly colonized Australia, filling multiple ecological niches. More than two million years after a second lineage differentiated and spread throughout Australasia and the Indonesian archipelago, which was at the time far closer to Australia than it is today, because much of the continental shelf was above water. V. komodoensis is a member of that lineage, having differentiated from it about four million years ago. The Indo-Australian varanids could take advantage of their unique fauna environment. Islands simply have fewer resources than large landmasses. Because reptilian predators can survive on much lower energy requirements than mammals can, a reptile will have the advantage in the race for top predator status, under similar conditions.
Komodo has a different paleogeography from its neighbors. According to world-wide sea-level changes over the past 80,000 years and bathymetric data of the study area, Flores and Rinca were joined ;until 10,000 years ago. Gili Motang was connected several times to their combined landmass. Komodo was long isolated but appears to have joined its eastern neighbors about 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum. That association may have lasted 4,000 years. Tantalizing fossil evidence supports the notion that todayâs Komodo populations are relics of a larger distributions that once reached Timor, to the east of Flores. Fossils of two identical forms of a now extinct pygmy elephant, Stegodon, about 1.5 meters at the shoulder, on both Timor and Flores suggest that those two islands might have been sufficiently close in the Pleistocene to allow migration. The limited resources of an island could have driven the evolution of the pygmy elephants, because smaller individuals, with lower food requirements, would have been selected for. In contrast, todayâs Komodo dragon may have evolved from a less bulky ancestor; the availability of the relatively small elephants as prey may have been a driving force in the selection of largeness that resulted in the modern three-meter Komodo. (A large reptile still needs far less food than a mammal of similar size.) Auffenberg suggests that the Komodo could once ãhave been a highly specialized pygmy stegodont predator,â although prey species similar to modern deer and boars may also have been present before the arrival of modern humans within the past 40,000 years.
Ouwens recruited a collector, who killed two Komodo Dragons, supposedly measuring 3.1 and 2.35 meters, and captured two young, each just under one ;meter. One examination of these specimens, Ouwens realized that the Komodo was in fact a monitor lizard. In the 1912 paper in which Ouwens introduced the Komodo to the rest of the world, he wrote simply that van Hensbroek ãhad received information . . . [that] on the island of Komodo occurred a Varanus species of an unusual size.ä Ouwens ended the paper by suggesting the creature be given the name V komodoensis. Understanding the Komodo to be both rare and magnificent, local rules and the Dutch colonial government instituted protection plans as early as 1915. After World War I a Berlin Zoological Museum expedition roused worldwide interest in the animal. In 1926 W. Douglas Burden of the American Museum of Natural History undertook a well-equipped outing to Komodo, capturing two dragons and describing anatomical features based on examinations of some 70 individuals. More and 15 expeditions followed Burdenâs, but it was Auffenberg who performed the most comprehensive field study, looking at everything from behavior and diet to demographics and the botanical features of their territory. Auffenberg determined that the Komodo is, in fact, rare. Recent estimates suggest that fewer than 3,500 dragons live within the boundaries of Komodo National Park. Volcanoes
Mt. Agung - Bali:
The Balinese believe that Mount Agung is the birthplace of the God Siwa and therefore represents eternal holiness. But as well as spiritual significance, the mountain, which at 3142m above sea level is the islandâs highest peak, also harbors astounding natural beauty. According to Arie Basuki, to stand on its summit is to become aware of natureâs metaphysical nuances Mount Agung is believed to the middle link in a chain of three volcanoes that includes Javaâs highest peak, the 3676m-high Mount Semeru to Baliâs west, and Lombokâs 3726m-high Mount Rinjani to its east. According to myth, Siwa made the mountains to ensure the stability of Nusantara (the Indonesian archipelago) by slicing three peaks from the Himalayas, and deposited them in Java, Bali and Lombok respectively. For this reason, all religious ceremonies held at Mount Agungâs Besakih temple make use of holy water deriving from both Mount Semeru and Mount Rinjani. Balinese believe Mount Agung to be the place where the great god Siwa resides. The Siwa-ist orientation of their religion is clearly reflected in the fact that the mother temple of Balinese Hinduism, Pura Besakih, is located on the slopes of Mount Agung. According to I Ketut Wiana, a Balinese Hindu intellectual, the erection of the temple on Mount Agung was meant to appease Siwa, and to protect the local population against volcanic eruptions. Eruptions
Eruptions of Agung: 1963-64, 1843, 1821, 1808  Picture: Rinjani's Caldera Famed for its great beauty and eerie isolation, Gunung Rinjani (3,726 m) Is the third-highest volcano mountain in Indonesia, towering over every corner of Lombok. Shrouded in clouds throughout the afternoon, the best time to catch an unimpeded view of Gunung Rinjani is the calm early morning hours. Physical Features Puncak Rinjani is the highest and steepest point on the edge of its caldera. While the crescent-shaped Lake Segara Anak within the caldera lies at height of just over 2000 meters. About three km at its widest, its depth is 230 meters. Plentiful fish inhabit its waters and waterfowl can be seen.  Picture:Northern Lombok from the Space Shuttle. The Gili Islands are featured top leftThe volcanic peak inside the caldera is considered quite young, Gunung Barujari (2,375 m) which is sat at the edge of the lake, rose only during the last century or two. Flora and Fauna Picture:Rinjani's wooded slopes Legend  Eruptions of Rinjani: 1994, 1966, 1965, 1953, 1949-50, 1944-45, 1941?, 1915, 1909, 1906, 1901, 1900, 1884, 1847 Mt. Tambora - Sumbawa:  Tambora from the space shuttle. It is possible to see some of Moyo Island and all of Satonda bottom left.
Tambora is a stratovolcano, forming the Sanggar peninsula of Sumbawa Island. The diameter of the volcano at sea-level is about 38 miles (60 km). Prior to the 1815 eruption, the volcano may have been as tall as 13,000 feet (4,000 meters). The 1815 eruption formed a caldera about 4 miles (6 km) in diameter. The caldera is 3,640 feet (1,110 meters) deep. The 1815 eruption of Tambora was the largest eruption in historic time. About 150 cubic kilometers of ash were erupted (about 150 times more than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens). Ash fell as far as 800 miles (1,300 km) from the volcano. In central Java and Kalimantan, 550 miles (900 km) from the eruption, one centimeter of ash fell. The Volcanic Explosivity of the eruption was 7. The eruption column reached a height of about 28 miles (44 km). The collapse of the eruption column produced numerous pyroclastic flows. As these hot pyroclastic flows reached the ocean where they caused additional explosions. During these explosions, most of the fine-fraction of the ash was removed. The eruption formed a caldera. An estimated 92,000 people were killed by the eruption. About 10,000 direct deaths were caused by bomb impacts, tephra fall, and pyroclastic flows. An estimated 82,000 were killed indirectly by the eruption by starvation, disease, and hunger. The 1815 eruption of Tambora caused the "Year without a Summer." Daily minimum temperatures were abnormally low in the northern hemisphere from late spring to early autumn. Famine was widespread because of crop failures. Eruptions of Tambora: 1967, 1880, 1812-15 Mt. Sangeang Api: Sangeang Api volcano, one of the most active in the Lesser Sunda Islands, forms a small 13-km-wide island off the NE coast of Sumbawa Island. Two large volcanic cones, 1,949-m-high Doro Api and 1,795-m-high Doro Mantoi, were constructed in the center and on the eastern rim, respectively, of an older, largely obscured caldera. Flank vents occur on the south side of Doro Mantoi and near the northern coast. Intermittent historical eruptions have been recorded since 1512, most of them during in the 20th century. Eruptions of Sangeang Api: 1985-88, 1966, 1964-65, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1954, 1953, 1927, 1912, 1911, 1860, 1821, 1715, 1512. |
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When a Komodo ambushes its prey, it attacks the feet first, knocking the animal off balance. When dealing with smaller prey, it may lunge straight for the neck. The basic strategy is simple: try and smash the quarry to the ground and tear it to pieces. Strong muscles driving powerful claws accomplish some of this, but the Komodo Dragon's teeth are its most dangerous weapon. They are large, curved and serrated, and tear flesh with the efficiency of a plough parting soil. 
Most mating occurs between May and August. Dominant males can become embroiled in ritual combat in their quest for females. Using their tails for support, they wrestle in upright postures, grabbing each other with their forelegs as they attempt to throw the opponent to the ground. Blood is usually drawn, and the loser either runs or remains prone and motionless. 
In such a setting reptiles can also evolve to huge size, an advantage for hunting. A varanid called Megalania prisca, extinct for around 25, 000 years, may have reached a length of six meters and a weight of 600 kilograms; the late extinction date means that humans may have encountered this monster. Komodo Dragons adopted a more moderate gigantism. Reasons for the Komodo Dragon's current restricted home range - the smallest of any large predator - are the subject of debate and study. Various researchers subscribe to alternative routes that the dragonsâ ancestors may have taken to their present locale of Komodo, Flores, Rinca, Gili Motang and Gili Dasami. 
The West was unaware of the Komodo until 1910, when Lieutenant van Steyn Hensbroek of the Dutch colonial administration heard local stories about a ãland crocodile.ä Members of a Dutch pearling fleet also told him yarns about creatures six or even seven meters long. Van Hensbroek eventually found and killed a Komodo measuring a more realistic 2.1 meters and sent a photograph and the skin to Peter A. Ouwens, director of the Zoological Museum and Botanical Gardens at Bogor, Java. 
Volcanoes are also worshipped as being the home of the gods and places of intense magic. Gunung Agung in Bali, Rinjani in Lombok and Bromo in East Java are all given annual offerings to appease angry spirits. The mighty Mount Merapi in Central Java, however, is probably the country's most famous volcano after Krakatau, both of which frequently spew hot ash and molten lava over mere mortals below. 
Home of the Gods 
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