If you want to see one of the largest lizards in the world, now is your chance.
Two Komodo dragons, the world’s largest living lizards, are at the Edmonton Valley Zoo until October.
Ophelia and Saphira, age four, are two female Komodo dragons that measure 1.5 metres long. Full-grown Komodo dragons can reach three metres long. The Komodo dragon can be dangerous to humans since they have sharp teeth and a venomous bite.
They can be viewed in their enclosure at the SAITO Centre at the Edmonton Valley Zoo. Come October, the lizards are off to Memphis, Tenn. to breed with male dragons.
Ophelia and Saphira are sisters, on loan from the Calgary Zoo. They have been in Edmonton since early last week. They are located in the reptile wing where the zoo keeps its cold-blooded creatures. The dragons are kept in an enclosure with temperature control between 35 and 40 degrees C and 70 per cent humidity.
Feeding the animals can be dangerous, so the Valley Zoo is taking precautions. Two workers equipped with arm shields enter the enclosure at feeding time. The dragons are fed several times a week with fish and quail. But the big carcass feeding for the public happens every second Sunday.
Ophelia and Saphira got a feeding of horse neck on July 16. The dragons don’t chew their food but instead they tear off pieces and swallow them whole.
“The older ones are cannibalistic so when they hatch out of their eggs, they (young ones) have to crawl up into trees to avoid predation,” says Megan Paranich, an Edmonton Valley Zoo worker. The baby dragons aren’t even safe from their own mothers.
Female dragons are known for parthenogenesis (when an unfertilized egg produces an offspring), which means they don’t need a male dragon to produce baby dragons.
“If you just have females and there’s no male, they can reproduce on their own but they only make male babies,” says Paranich. Two identical sex chromosomes (XX) make a male, and two different ones make a female (XY). This is the opposite for humans, which is why a female Komodo produces only male dragons as they can only duplicate chromosomes. Duplicating the Y is not a gender-specific chromosome so this leads to only duplicating the X, which are male dragons.
“They are considered vulnerable because their population is declining on the island of Indonesia where they live and because they are the only large carnivores on those islands, they are an important part of the food chain. So we do want to build up that population in captivity so one day we can start releasing them into the wild to get them back to that healthy level,” says Paranich.
Ophelia and Saphira can be viewed during the zoo’s regular hours but if you want to watch the dragons eat, carcass feeding for the dragons can be seen every second Sunday at 10:30 a.m. The next feeding will be on July 30.
