Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

Bags of dried seahorses – dead because of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

  We discussed the Zen art of relaxation and the importance of taking time off, which neither of us knew much about, while Stephen slipped out of his wetsuit in the way a high-security prisoner might slip out of a straitjacket.

  ‘But I do have one important question,’ he said after catching his breath for a few minutes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If swimming is so good for you, why are whales fat?’

  Normally, it’s me trying to persuade the director to let us stay longer, but this time it was Stephen who used all his powers of persuasion to win us another day of diving and snorkelling at Sipadan. I’ll never forget when he knocked on the door of my luxurious stilted chalet to tell me the good news. He was obviously feeling a little guilty, because he looked like a small boy allowed to stay up late on a school night, but he was terribly pleased with himself all the same.

  We did take time out to visit an underwater field of seagrass, to see if we could find a herd of grazing seahorses. We didn’t find an entire herd, but, in about 2 metres (6.5 feet) of water, we did spot two thorny seahorses about the size of a travel toothbrush. They had wrapped their tails around grass stems near the sea bed. Careful not to kick up the sand with our fins, or the visibility would have dropped to zero, we took it in turns to duck-dive down to take a closer look.

  The two unlikely fish were masters of camouflage and very easy to lose as they glided in and out amongst the stems. They reminded me a little of the aye-aye, in Madagascar. Not that they look anything like an alien lemur of course, but they do look as if they have been made from bits of other animals: a horse’s head, obviously, but also a monkey’s prehensile tail, a chameleon’s eyes moving about independently, and a kangaroo’s pouch.

  The most astonishing thing about seahorses is that the male – not the female – gets pregnant, and the pouch is where it all happens. The female deposits her eggs into it, and the male fertilises them with his sperm. The pouch then acts like the womb of a female mammal, complete with placental fluid that bathes the eggs and provides nutrients and oxygen to the developing embryos. It even removes waste products.

  The eggs hatch inside the pouch and, as the baby seahorses develop, the male begins to look decidedly pregnant. The babies (called fry – no relation) look like miniature versions of their parents, but with proportionately larger heads. They are usually born at night, when the male goes into labour, pumping and thrusting for several hours to release his brood. As far as is known, it’s the most extreme form of male parental care in any animal.

  So what do we humans do to celebrate and honour such magnificent creatures? We eat them, of course. Not all of us, admittedly, but a lot of people in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan put seahorses in boiling water and then drink the resulting broth as a tonic, a kind of pick-me-up. Countless tonnes of seahorses are also used every year in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to treat everything from incontinence and impotence to asthma. Just imagine how many tiny seahorses it takes to weigh ‘countless tonnes’ – and that’s not including the hundreds of thousands captured alive every year for ornamental display (almost every seahorse you are ever likely to see in an aquarium or tank has been caught in the wild).

  A crate of shark fins, ready to be turned into shark fin soup.

  I was shocked to discover that the scale of the industry is so huge many Asian fishermen earn the majority of their income from seahorses.

  We went into a shop in Borneo to witness the trade for ourselves. Stephen is incredibly polite most of the time but even he was struggling to maintain a degree of good manners, as we strolled past walls and shelves packed with a frightening assortment of animal products. There were huge crates full of shark fins and sea cucumbers (‘they look like ossified turds’ according to Stephen), while bags hanging from the ceiling each contained hundreds, if not thousands, of dried seahorses.

  Unfortunately, no matter what the rest of us may think about Traditional Chinese Medicine, the fact is that a quarter of the entire human population thinks it works. And few of them give a damn about the impact it has on the world’s increasingly endangered wildlife. It’s one of the greatest challenges facing conservationists today.

  We were sitting in an open-air bar in Labuan Bajo, a ramshackle little port on the western coast of Flores, looking out across a huddle of rusty tin roofs towards Komodo. Stephen was reading the local paper, the Straits Times, and I was busy fixing a problem with my camera.

  ‘Mark!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, really, Mark.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Listen to this. It’s in the paper. “Man killed by Komodo dragons” is the headline. “Two Komodo dragons mauled a fruit-picker to death in eastern Indonesia, police and witnesses said yesterday, the latest in a string of attacks on humans by the world’s largest lizard species.” What do you think of that?’

  It was unfortunate timing – not least for the fruit-picker. Stephen was yet to be convinced about the arguments for going to see a Komodo dragon in the wild, and the latest attack didn’t help.

  But Komodo dragons don’t really deserve their dreadful reputation for killing people. Being a man-eater isn’t necessarily bad in itself. Lions and tigers are man-eaters and, though we don’t actually like to be eaten by them, we don’t resent the very idea. I think it’s because Komodo dragons are reptiles and, given a choice, we prefer to be eaten by mammals. This partly explains why we have such an irrational fear of sharks which, of course, are fish.

  Besides, Komodo dragons attack people surprisingly rarely – and kill them even more rarely. There was an awful incident on 4 June 2007, when an eight-year-old boy was killed on the island of Komodo, but that was the first fatal attack in more than thirty years. Admittedly, a number of villagers can boast impressive Komodo dragon scars, so there is no denying that they are buggers to have living on your doorstep. The locals must be pretty tolerant to put up with them. There are benefits from living in a national park – and there is money to be made by selling carved Komodo dragons to tourists – but it can’t be particularly easy or pleasant. We make such a fuss in safety-conscious Britain whenever anyone mentions the prospect of reintroducing wolves that we should be in eternal awe of anyone prepared to live next door to Komodo dragons.

  A Komodo dragon and a tiny teddy. One has been on every Last Chance to See shoot and will be auctioned off for charity; the other hasn’t.

  Here be dragons.

  Stephen considered the implications of all this, looked for a moment as if he might say something, then shook his head and went back to reading the paper.

  I’m afraid talking about dangerous animals is rocking one of my (many) hobbyhorses. I tend to get very irritated by our obsession with them. Komodo dragons aren’t all sweetness and light, of course, but they have a fearsome reputation mainly because people love to exaggerate.

  Certain television naturalists have added fuel to the fire by manhandling, provoking and bullying so-called dangerous animals to try and make themselves stars, pushing the hapless creatures to the limits to make, cheap, kiss-me-quick telly.

  The Felicia sets sail for Komodo.

  Their apparent determination to prove that all animals are baddies and out to get us means that virtually every creature they brandish in front of the camera is in distress. Have you ever noticed how it is always the TV presenters doing the chasing? The animals are trying to get away.

  I’ve rubbed shoulders with great white sharks, slept with a puff adder, tripped over an alligator and had goodness knows how many other close encounters with supposedly dangerous animals over many years in the field. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been badly bumped, bitten or stung.

  Some people argue that this style of television is the only way to reach a human population with virtually zero interest in wildlife. But I believe it encourages entirely the wrong attitude towards wildlife – manipulative, domineering and
interfering. I’m sure the people responsible are well meaning, but I question the kind of interest this misguided programming inspires. Surely, some of the people responsible – in front of the camera and behind – must have stopped, just for a moment, and thought, ‘This is wrong’?

  That said, Komodo dragons have had a rather fearsome reputation for much longer than they’ve been appearing on television.

  For centuries, the Chinese came to Komodo looking for its underwater treasure trove of pearls. They returned with stories of great scaly man-eating monsters with fiery breath – stories that are believed to have been the origin of the Chinese dragon myth, or at least to have enhanced it. It is, after all, a large creature with scales, it is a man-eater, and though it doesn’t actually breathe fire, it does have ‘the worst breath of any creature known to man’ (to quote Douglas Adams, who was talking from personal experience).

  People at the time used to write ‘Here be dragons’ on their maps when they saw a land they didn’t like the look of. Komodo was such a land. Rumour has it that it was marked ‘Here be dragons’ in bold capital letters, underlined and with several exclamation marks (I’m embellishing the rumour – but it was definitely a place travellers were warned about for being dangerous and inhospitable).

  And then, at the beginning of the last century, a pioneering Dutch aviator was attempting to island-hop his way along the Indonesian archipelago to Australia when he had engine trouble and had to crash-land his plane on Komodo. He survived the crash but his plane didn’t. When he went to search for water, he found a strange wide track on the beach, so he followed the track, and suddenly found himself confronted with a dragon. Against all the odds he survived, and was rescued. But when he returned home, and described the great scaly man-eating monsters he had lived with for three horrible months, nobody of course believed a word of it. He may have survived, but his reputation didn’t.

  Strange tales continued to filter out of the region. Traders and fishermen brought back stories of giant prehistoric lizards, but they were assumed to be the ravings of men who had been at sea for too long. No one seriously thought such things existed, except in people’s wildest imaginations.

  Finally, the Dutch sent a scientific expedition to settle the matter. In the spirit of scientific expeditions at the time, they shot a Komodo dragon and sent it back for evaluation. It was identified as a member of the monitor lizard family and nothing less than the largest lizard in the world.

  Fortunately, Stephen likes a good story – and nowadays he likes a good adventure, too – so he was in surprisingly high spirits when we set sail from Labuan Bajo on the Felicia, a traditional teak and ironwood sailing boat.

  ‘Whoever would have thought Mrs Fry’s little boy would one day be able to say that he is sailing the South China Sea,’ he said. ‘And what a heavenly place it is. Look at those islands. They’ve got that classic Southeast Asian humpiness – they’re unlike islands anywhere else in the world.’

  He was so glad to be on the way to Komodo, in fact, that he kept calling out completely irrelevant and unconnected thoughts (he does that when he is happy).

  ‘Look – terns,’ he said, as we passed a small flock of great crested terns. ‘Shall we throw rocks at them? Aren’t we supposed to leave no tern unstoned?’

  A few moments passed and he uttered another little gem: ‘Your karma ran over my dogma.’

  He started to write some notes and, in a voice straight out of Star Trek, pretended to read them aloud: ‘It’s getting increasingly difficult to write these diary entries. Mark died this morning, dragged into the bushes by a gang of vicious dragons. It won’t be long until the rest of us succumb…’

  And so it went on for the entire journey to Komodo. Or, at least, it would have done if we hadn’t stopped off en route to visit the neighbouring island of Rinca, which has its own population of Komodo dragons.

  ‘Never wear polyester when you’re walking in Komodo dragon country,’ said Stephen as we clambered ashore.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Komodo dragons can’t digest polyester.’

  We walked along a well-worn path to the ranger post at a place called Loh Baru, on the southwest side of Rinca. We wanted to see the office of the Chief Ranger, Pak Maain, whom we’d met the day before we left Labuan Bajo. We walked up the steps and peered inside. The main wall and part of the floor were covered in blood, like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie. A few months earlier, the 55-year-old ranger had entered his office, as he had done many times before, and just as he went to sit at his desk he saw a 1.5-metre (5-foot) dragon loitering underneath. It grabbed him by the foot and an almighty struggle ensued. Pak Maain tried to shake it off and then attempted to prize open the animal’s mouth with his bare hands. Eventually, he broke free and managed to climb on top of the office cupboard. By this time his colleagues, who had heard his cries for help, had come to chase the dragon away with sticks. His hand, arm and leg were all terribly swollen when we saw him, but he was expected to make a full recovery.

  We left the office and continued along the path. There, lounging around under one of the stilted wooden huts, were seven giant lizards, ranging in length from less than 1 metre to well over 2 metres (3 to 7 feet).

  Chief Ranger Pak Maain and his injuries.

  Just look at those beady eyes.

  ‘Holy mackerel!’ said Stephen (not so appropriate this time). ‘I thought I was ugly, but this is ridiculous. They’re really not the most attractive animals, are they?’

  I’m afraid I had to agree with him. Komodo dragons are animals of minimal cuteness. Maybe they’re an acquired taste, and we were still in the process of acquiring it.

  I was going to say that only a Komodo dragon mother would love a Komodo dragon, but even that isn’t true. A baby dragon is just food as far as Mum (or any other adult) is concerned. It moves about and has a bit of meat on it, so it’s edible. If the adults ate all the youngsters, of course, the species would die out, so that wouldn’t work very well. But the dragons survive because the babies have acquired an instinct to climb trees – and the much bigger adults can’t. So the babies just sit up in trees, out of harm’s way, until they’re big enough to look after themselves.

  The largest of the dragons under the rangers’ hut was looking straight at me and I have to say it was far and away the most malevolent expression I’d seen in millions of years. It was more than 100 kilos (220 pounds) of malevolence wrapped up in loose, leathery skin, complete with unblinking, don’t-mess-with-me eyes.

  ‘Even its skin makes mine crawl,’ said Stephen.

  A giant lizard’s skin is scaly, of course, and that’s absolutely fine. But there is something a little unnerving about the way it hangs around in folds, crinkles and creases. The Komodo dragon is built like a concertina – the folds of skin give it plenty of room to expand when it eats. It can eat as much as 80 per cent of its own weight in one sitting (it swallows everything – including bones, horns and hooves), and the skin just stretches out like a great big bag.

  Every single dragon was dribbling. Actually, I’m being far too polite – they were positively drooling. Saliva was pouring out of the sides of their mouths. And that saliva is very unpleasant indeed.

  Proof that Komodo dragons are animals of minimal cuteness.

  If you ever get bitten by a Komodo dragon, I’m afraid you are in very serious trouble. You see, when one lies in wait for a large animal such as a horse or a buffalo, it doesn’t necessarily expect to kill it there and then. If it gets involved in a fight it might be injured, and there’s no benefit in that, so sometimes it will just bite its prey and walk away.

  Clearly, there is something in the dragon’s bite that ensures the animal will weaken and die within a few days, whereupon the dragon can eat it at leisure (or another dragon can eat it at leisure, if it happens to find it first).

  There was a well-known case of a Frenchman who was bitten by a dragon, while visiting Komodo. The wound festered and would just never heal
, and he eventually died in Paris two years later. Unfortunately, there were no dragons in Paris to take advantage of it so the strategy broke down on that particular occasion, but normally it works very well.

  The general consensus has always been that the secret lay in the dragon’s fetid saliva. It contains a witch’s brew of toxic bacteria – 57 different strains at the last count – which are so virulent the wounds never heal and the bitten animal usually dies of septicaemia.

  I mentioned all this to Stephen.

  ‘That’s the creepiest way of earning a living I’ve ever heard,’ he said. ‘That’s lower than a dung beetle. It’s even lower than a banker or an estate agent.’

  But recent research just published suggests that Komodo dragons may actually be venomous – making them by far the largest venomous creatures on the planet. For the first time, scientists have found glands in their mouths that produce venom as potent as that found in some of the world’s most dangerous snakes. It works by causing a sudden and severe drop in blood pressure, sending the prey into shock, and then it prevents the blood from clotting, to ensure that the hapless animal bleeds to death.

  This deadly combination of venom and sharp, serrated teeth works as well as a poisoned dagger.

  Indonesia has between 17,508 and 18,306 islands altogether, depending on whom you believe. The exact number is a little vague because everyone who has ever tried to tot them all up has eventually lost count, or got bored. Komodo dragons live on only five of them – Komodo, obviously, and Rinca, but also the islets of Gili Motang and Gili Dasami, and a very tiny corner of Flores – all about 480 kilometres (300 miles) east of Bali.

  There are believed to be fewer than 1,400 dragons in the wild (when Douglas Adams and I visited Komodo in 1988 the official figure was 5,000 – but everyone thinks that was probably a miscalculation). Even 1,400 sounds like quite a lot, but the problem is that fewer than fifty of them are breeding females. A forest fire, a disease outbreak or a sudden decline in prey species could wipe out the entire breeding population in one fell swoop.