You’re Not Ready for How Playful Komodo Dragons Can Be    Smithsonian Channel - video Dailymotion

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00:00 On a remote island in Indonesia,

00:04 there's a species of lizard that's making scientists

00:07 rethink how important clay might be

00:10 across the animal kingdom.

00:11 The Komodo dragon.

00:18 Measuring up to 10 feet long,

00:22 it's the largest lizard on earth.

00:27 These reptiles have venom so potent

00:30 they can take down prey nearly 10 times their size.

00:36 But could Komodo dragons also have an appetite for fun?

00:43 Professor Gordon Burghardt has been studying them

00:50 in captivity for the last 20 years.

00:53 - Well, one of the things I really like about Komodo dragons

00:56 is that they are the world's largest lizard,

00:59 but they also have really interesting behavior

01:02 and they play.

01:04 Many people may think that Komodo dragons

01:06 are just a killing machine,

01:08 but actually their life is quite complex.

01:11 So there's much more to their behavior

01:13 than just their killing instinct.

01:16 - Gordon introduced new objects

01:19 to see how the dragons reacted to them.

01:25 The dragons were curious,

01:27 but what came next was unexpected

01:30 and seemed a lot like playing.

01:33 - If she's just checking it out and not doing anything,

01:44 then it's more exploratory behavior.

01:46 But once she starts interacting with it

01:48 in more than just a cursory fashion,

01:51 then we would consider that object play.

01:53 (playful music)

01:56 - The more time the lizards spent with the objects,

02:01 the more playful their behavior became.

02:03 In his research, Gordon became convinced

02:16 that the Komodo's unrewarded repetition

02:19 of such unusual behavior crossed the line into play.

02:23 And it made him wonder,

02:28 why would lizards play in this way?

02:31 - It dawned on me that this behavior

02:33 is probably derived from their communal feeding behavior.

02:37 These animals can bring down a large carcass

02:41 and they have to disembowel it

02:42 and actually put their heads deep into the carcass

02:45 to get the food.

02:47 - So playing with its head in the bucket

02:50 was akin to eating with its head buried deep in a carcass.

02:53 This observation was one of the first examples of play

03:00 ever recorded in reptiles.

03:02 (playful music)

03:07 (upbeat music)

You’re Not Ready for How Playful Komodo Dragons Can Be Smithsonian Channel

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