Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
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)