See this Beastly Komodo Dragon Gobble Up an Entire Stingray like It’s a Morning Pancake

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A rotting fish may not be your idea of a tempting meal but to a Komodo dragon – it’s breakfast. However, as the video below shows, swallowing your prey whole is not exactly easy when the meal is a stingray!

How Do Komodo Dragons Detect Prey?

Komodo dragons are opportunistic carnivores. They can kill their own prey but also feed on carrion (dead and decaying carcasses). Also, they do not have any tastebuds so the fact that rotting flesh must taste terrible would not bother them.

As can be seen in this clip, the Komodo dragon uses its tongue to collect odors from the air. It moves the tongue up and down to collect molecules and then retracts it into the mouth to the vomeronasal organs. These are sensory cells within the main nasal chamber that detect heavy moisture-borne odor particles. Large adult dragons can eat wild boar and water buffalo. The hatchlings feed on beetles and grasshoppers.

How Do Komodo Dragons Eat?

Larger animals are torn apart before they are swallowed but smaller prey is swallowed whole. At first glance, it seems a physical impossibility for this lizard to swallow the stingray whole. It does take a lot of effort! The Komodo dragon has to try many different angles and uses the surrounding rocks to help it position the ray for swallowing. Eventually, it figures out that if it puts the stingray ‘sting first’ into its mouth, the broad fins fold neatly forward and the entire body fits in.

To facilitate swallowing large objects, the Komodo has flexible jaws that move forward to engulf the animal. Its hyoid apparatus (the bones attached to the tongue) moves the food backward to the esophagus (the tube leading to the stomach). Then, the neck muscles bend from side to side to move food through the esophagus. To give an example, a 110-pound Komodo dragon has been seen swallowing a 68-pound boar in 17 minutes. Compared to that, this stingray was a mere snack!