Joan Procter. Her Reptile House at London Zoo and Reptilian Thermoregulation

It is only when one reads the detail of Joan Procter’s Reptile House at London Zoo that one realises she was decades ahead of her time in terms of knowledge of the thermal requirements of reptiles. The Reptile House opened in June 1927. Apart from its ‘aquarium-principle’ lighting, crowd circulation and safe-handling area for venomous snakes, the spectra of both natural and artificial lighting were specified while additional heat was supplied to different places of the cages thus creating a temperature gradient which allowed the animals to bask and raise their body temperature above that of their surroundings.

In Joan Procter’s own words when describing how the Komodo Dragons were housed and how they had lived in the new Reptile House for 18 months:

They live in a large enclosure of natural shingle and soil, planted with living palm-trees, and provided with a cave, rocks, and a swimming-pool. A great deal of care has been exercised to provide proper climatic conditions. The roof is of Vita-glass, transparent to ultra-violet light, and Vita-lamps for artificial sunlight are installed together with two large flood-light lamps. Dull-heat radiators of the beam type are also fixed, and all this apparatus, which is invisible to the public. is protected by massive steel bars. Further, the rocks themselves are electrically heated with a type of black-heat radiator let into the actual rock, and controlled, together with the air-heaters by a thermostat, which in turn is governed by a fool-proof warning system. The light and heat are chiefly focussed on a large rock in the centre of the enclosure, and, as the dragons immediately discovered this, they are usually to be seen sunning themselves upon it.

Those who know anything about reptiles will recognise this as a throughly modern way of keeping lizards. As I pointed out in a previous article the Vita glass was to let ultraviolet rays in sunlight reach the animals. Her ‘Vita-lamps’ were actually ultraviolet-emitting lamps with Vita glass filters to block just the very short wavelengths which experiments had determined were deleterious.

Previously, reptiles kept in temperate climates were kept in accommodation heated to the temperature of a tropical shade environment. Most had no opportunity to bask and raise their temperature above the ambient. The science of thermoregulation in reptiles really only took off in the 1940s and the concepts like ‘preferred body temperature’ and  ‘behavioural thermoregulation’ developed. Thus while reptiles are indeed cold-blooded they were found able to maintain body temperatures above that of their surroundings during the hours of daylight by shuttling between the heat of the sun and the relative cool of the shade. Komodo Dragons have been shown, comparatively recently, to follow that pattern.

The preferred body temperature was later shown to be that which is optimal for biochemical processes within the body. Reptiles not allowed to achieve their preferred body temperature, even though kept in warm ‘tropical’ daytime air temperatures, were function sub-optimally. It is not surprising that such animals are lethargic, their immune system left unable to cope with infection and infestation, do not breed—and do not survive for very long. Reptiles, particularly larger ones, take a long time to die.

Joan Procter was aware that she had designed accommodation for Komodo Dragons that was superior to that elsewhere. She quoted from William Douglas Burden’s book Dragon Lizards of Komodo (see my article on the Burden expedition to Komodo here):

     …We hear of specimens taken to New York* that “it was painful to see the broken spirited beasts that barely had strength to drag themselves from one end of their cage to the other.”     ‘’"SureIy it is not all a matter of diet and change of climate... Perhaps…Varanus komodoensis, in order to survive, demands the freedom of his rugged mountains.” ...,but our specimens are perfectly happy in captivity, are attached to their keepers and their friends, and are putting on a great deal of weight.

I think we can take that as London 2: New York 0, 1928 style.

This photograph of a small boy and a Komodo Dragon may have been
taken in the original accommodation in the Reptile House in London
Zoo in 1932. Joan Procter and the keepers always seemed keen
to demonstrate how tame the Dragons had become

The heating and lighting equipment was not ‘off the shelf’. The General Electric Company Ltd (not to be confused with the American company of the same name) had research and development labs at Wembley. The Times (15 June 1927) in describing the new house reported:

The very elaborate electrical installation devised by the Research Department of the General Electric Company to meet the special requirements forms an achievement in electrical installation which is unique, and cannot be described in detail here. It may be said, however, that the installation has approximately 20 miles of electric cable for the heating system and 12 miles for the indicators and tell-tales, and that some of the compartments have up to 200 electrical connexions. The wiring for lighting is almost equally elaborate.

Miss Procter wanted material for the walls that could be cleaned. She therefore had the theatrical scenic artist, John Bull, use car enamel that would be resistant to scrubbing. I cannot find a photograph of any of the scenes painted on the walls of the cages—perhaps a good job since I utterly loathe naturalistic painted backgrounds.

It is clear from contemporary diagrams that the Komodo Dragons were kept in the large enclosures at the southern end of the Reptile House, used, ever since I first went to the Zoo in the 1950s, to house crocodilians. Their glass roofs can be seen in Google Earth—just a short distance away from the new housing for Komodo Dragons.

This Google Earth View of the Reptile House shows the windows
above the cages where the Komodo Dragons were housed. Vita
glass was installed originally. Has it survived?
The new enclosure covered in plastic is the current housing
for Komodo Dragons

It is easy to criticise—ninety years after it opened—aspects of the Reptile House. The compartments for large snakes seem of the wrong proportions, for example. The domestic architect but President of RIBA, Guy (later Sir) Dawber (1861-1938), who took Joan Procter’s very detailed plans, made them buildable and added the external features seems to have missed a few tricks. The sides, especially the western elevation which forms one side of the alley between the equally depressing edge of the Mappin Terraces, are devoid of life. Guillery suggests the outward-facing cage on the eastern side (which often used to house interesting chelonians and is the only relief from the drabness) was inserted later. Dawber also designed—again from a detailed layout by Joan Procter and Chalmers Mitchell—the exterior of the nearby main entrance to the Zoo in the same Italianate style used by earlier architects. I sometimes wonder if Dawber took umbrage at the minor role he was accorded by the Chalmers Mitchell publicity machine; he did not attend the opening of the Reptile House.

But Joan Procter’s house was clearly a great leap forward for the Zoo. But there was still much to learn since reptiles and amphibians died in large numbers after importation. Even the best conditions will not reverse the effects of the stress of capture, storage in unsuitable accommodation and then long sea journeys at temperatures below the optimum together with under- and/or mal-nutrition. Real advances, other than air transport, in how to keep reptiles, other than the ‘easy’ species, would not come for another four or five decades.

I can't resist showing one of my photographs of these wild Komodo Dragons
taken in 2016

*These Komodo Dragons in New York seem to have been forgotten by historians. Their arrival in USA is usually given as 1934, Washington.

Guillery P. 1993. The Buildings of London Zoo. London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.

Peaker M. 1969. Some aspects of the thermal requirements of reptiles in captivity. International Zoo Yearbook 9, 3-8. Zoological Society of London. London: Academic Press. 

Procter JB. 1928. On a living Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis Ouwens, exhibited at the Scientific Meeting, 23 October 1928. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1928, 1017–1019.

Another Zoo Quest to Komodo: the Burden Expedition of 1926

The best-publicised expedition to Komodo in the early decades of the 20th Century was that led by William Douglas Burden (1898-1978). He offered to use his own money—he was a scion of the Vanderbilt family—to collect for the American Museum of Natural History. Not surprisingly his offer was accepted. He also persuaded the Dutch Government to carry him there on their official yacht,  the S.S. Dog. He gathered, along with his first wife, Katharine Curtin White (1903-1976)(they were divorced in 1939), a big-game hunter and Emmett Reid Dunn (1894-1956), then at Smith College, as herpetologist. They called at Singapore where a cinematographer joined along with fifteen Malay helpers.

The expedition spent five weeks on Komodo. Pretty sensational stories were published of encounters with feral water buffalo, poisonous snakes and of Mrs Burden coming between a dragon and its prey. So sensational that when Burden told his story to a Hollywood producer, the Komodo Dragon morphed into a giant ape, Mrs Burden into Fay Wray, and the whole tale into King Kong which hit the cinemas in 1933.

Burden wrote an article for National Geographic Magazine in 1927. The text is extremely short and that dealing with the Komodo part of their expedition even shorter. This is a photograph from that article:

Both Burden and Dunn produced more sober accounts of the expedition and of the Komodo Dragons that were encountered and collected dead and alive. Twelve were taken back dead, for the museum (a museum that never knowingly under-collected), where some can be seen today, and two alive for the Bronx Zoo in New York. The live ones reached New York alive but only just; one died soon after arrival, the other within two months. Long sea voyages at temperatures well below the preferred body temperature soon saw them off.

Five papers on the results of the expedition were written by Burden and Dunn; they appeared in American Museum Novitates. Two, one by Burden and one by Dunn, are concerned with the Komodo Dragon. Dunn’s paper concentrated on the size of males and females, together with the relationships of the various varanid species both extant and extinct. Burden covered such topics as how Dragons came to be be on the Komodo island group and Flores, their population, habitat, feeding and behaviour.

Burden led a number of collecting expeditions for the Museum and has been described as ‘geologist, naturalist, hunter, filmmaker and author’. Of particular note here is that he went on to be a co-founder, with Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of Leo), Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and Sherman Pratt of Marineland in 1938. Originally called Marine Studios and intended for underwater filming, it became the famous public aquarium reaching its zenith of popularity in the 1950s and 60s. Decades of decline followed and although re-launched on a much smaller scale, the original 1938 oceanarium has been demolished.

Dunn was a well-known herpetologist. He taught at Smith College, a liberal arts college for women, in Massachusetts from 1916 until 1928. He was awarded a Harvard PhD in 1921 for work done at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. A Guggenheim Fellowship after Smith College led to Haverford College in Pennsylvania; he became Professor of Biology in 1934. He was President of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in 1930-31.

The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles* has a wonderful story about Dunn. During World War I he applied to become an officer in the U.S. army. He was rejected because his weekend pursuit of salamanders and snakes was considered ‘unbecoming in an officer and a gentleman’. He joined the U.S. Navy instead.


*Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2011. The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Burden WD. 1927. Stalking the dragon lizard on the island of Komodo. National Geographic Magazine 52 (2, August 1927), 216-233

Burden WD. 1927. Dragon Lizards of Komodo. New York: Putnam

Burden WD. 1927. Results of the Douglas Burden Expedition to the island of Komodo. V.—Observations on the habits and distribution of  Varanus komodoensis Ouwens. American Museum Novitates 316, 1-10

Dunn ER. 1927. Results of the Douglas Burden Expedition to the island of Komodo. 1.—Notes on Varanus komodoensis. American Museum Novitates 286, 1-10

Lutz D, Lutz JM. 1997. The Living Dragon. 2nd edition. Salem, Oregon: DIMI Press

There is a lot of information on Burden’s expedition and on Burden himself available. A simple Google search suffices but the sources here, here and here, in addition to those above, have proved particularly useful.

Komodo Dragons: The Moyne Zoo Quest Expedition of 1934-5 and Lady Broughton’s photographs

One way to get animals from faraway places in the early decades of the 20th Century was to get the super-rich of the day to collect them. One such expedition, which brought Komodo Dragons to London Zoo (not the first as is often claimed but the third and fourth to be received there) was that of Lord Moyne, Walter Edward Guinness (1880-1944). The clue to his wealth is the surname. 

In 1933 Guinness bought a cross-channel ferry from Southern Railways, had it converted to diesel power and renamed it Rosaura. In December 1934 the yacht set off for the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans; Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston, was one of the guests; she joined at Messina. Moyne flew to Rangoon and joined the yacht there. His observations on the varied cultures were published in his book, Walkabout: A Journey in Lands Between the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Heinemann, 1936).

Photographs on the expedition cruise were taken by Lady Broughton, who also joined at Rangoon  with Moyne, and who is variously described as ‘companion’, ‘friend’ and ‘mistress’ according to the source and era of publication; she wrote an article for National Geographic Magazine describing how they captured the dragons.

Lady Vera Edyth Broughton (1894-1968) at the time was married to Sir Jock Delves Broughton. They were divorced in 1940 and he achieved notoriety as a member of the Happy Valley set in Kenya after the lover of his second wife was shot dead; Delves Broughton was acquitted of the murder but killed himself at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool in December 1942. The film White Mischief covers the story with varying degrees of historical accuracy.

Throughout the 1930s Lady Broughton was known as an explorer, as a big game hunter, as a pursuer of large fish with rod and line and as a photographer of the natural history and anthropological worlds. Quite a gal.

She and Moyne were involved in fishing for what were known in Britain as tunny fish at Scarborough during the 1930s. It is difficult to imagine now that Scarborough was a resort of the super rich of the 1930s but it was the fishing for very large individuals of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) that took them to the town where they sere seen bringing their catches to be weighed by the holidaymakers from the industrial midlands and north. My father recalled seeing the huge fish (some weighing over 300 kg) being brought ashore. In 1949 although I saw no tuna but I do recall photographs on display that showed the giants being weighed. The tuna, incidentally, disappeared as the North Sea was overfished and shoals of their prey species became depleted.

Embed from Getty Images

Captioned: August 1933: Amongst the tunny fishers at Dogger Bank are Lord Moyne and Ladt Broughton

Lord Moyne, a friend and political supporter of Churchill in the 1930s, is now remembered in Britain more for his demise—assassinated in 1944 while in Egypt by members of the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang—than his achievements in life. He was serving as Resident Minister in the wartime coalition government.

In her article in National Geographic on the Komodo Dragon, Lady Broughton wrote:

One of the most prized inhabitants of the London Zoo had died—a dragon lizard from the island of Komodo.     As the zoo was eager to replace this interesting creature, rare in captivity, Lord Moyne, who had visited Komodo some years previously agreed to revisit the island last year with the object of securing specimens. I had the good fortune to be one of Lord Moyne’s guests on his yacht Rosaura and to have opportunity to take the accompanying photographs…
     The Netherlands Resident of Timor, responsible for the government of these islands, kindly came to Komodo in his yacht with several of his officials while we were there, and our success in capturing the “dragons” was mainly due to the help of our obliging friends…
     We spent about ten days on Komodo in our effort to catch the largest possible specimens. We secured seven, but, as we had permission to bring back only three, we released the smaller captives whenever we could replace them by larger ones.
     …I was able to spend my time procuring a series of pictures. Neat the rock where the trap had previously stood, we tied up a dead goat and prepared a cover of green canvas and branches, from behind which I could watch and photograph the reptiles without being seen by them…
     In their wild state they are said to be dangerous, but I cannot support this statement. I spent days watching, at close range, dragons of all sizes up to about twelve feet in length. I had no protection other than the small hedge of cut branches and leaves. At no time did the creatures show any signs of attacking me…

Lady Broughton in her hide (blind in USA) from
National Geographic article. The camera appears
to be a Dainty Soho Reflex taking 2 ½" x 3 ½"
 plates held in double dark-slides.

She concluded:

     When the yacht was some days out on the homeward journey, one of the dragons burst its way through the netting, and, as no trace of it was ever found on the ship, presumably it jumped overboard. The other two were safely delivered to the zoo and, in addition, our cameras had captured numerous others that are still free to partake of their odoriferous banquets on the hills and beaches of Komodo.

Komodo Dragons were not the only animals brought back. There is an appendix to the book (which I have not seen) which lists them. Clementine Churchill brought back a dove from Bali.

Photographs of the two dragons at London Zoo by Wolf Suschitzky are shown in Animal and Zoo Magazine April 1941. In the description of the Reptile House, David Seth-Smith wrote: In the end cases of the house are to be found the Komodo dragons…Were the enclosure he described those at the raised end of the house latterly used to house crocodilians? Previously, Geoffrey Vevers had reported in the same magazine (April 1939 issue): …the two seven-foot long komodo dragons have been moved to larger quarters as they have outgrown their former home. They were presented by Lord Moyne in 1935, and have been growing steadily ever since at the rate of half a foot a year.

Wolf Suschitzky's photographs of the two dragons at London Zoo
from Animal and Zoo Magazine

Hampton Wildman Parker’s (1897-1968) article in the third issue (Autumn 1946) of Zoo Life, the postwar magazine launched by the Zoological Society, takes up the story: Additional specimens, which died only recently, were collected and presented to the Zoo in 1936[1935 - there are a number of errors with dates in this article] by the late Lord Moyne, but these also, after nine years in captivity, gave no indication that they were likely to grow to a length greater than about ten feet.

Lady Broughton mentioned in her National Geographic article that cine film was taken during the expedition. I have found an entry on Lord Clement-Jones’s website:

Recently Project Walkabout held a reception in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association room next to Westminster Hall to celebrate the expeditions to the South Pacific undertaken by Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne and by my great Aunt Vera Delves Broughton. 

Project Walkabout is a charity set up by the grandchildren of Walter and Vera, Diana Moores and Lavinia Verney respectively, with the objective of preserving the film taken at that time by Arthur, Viscount Elvedon, another member of the Guinness family.This is their website. http://projectwalkaboutdotorg.wordpress.com/lady-broughton/ The reception featured photographs taken by Vera and clips of some of the restored footage courtesy of Susanne Hammacher of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

I have no further information on what has happened to the project but it would be rather nice to see the BBC broadcasting digitised versions of these historically important films rather than throwing huge amounts of licence-payers’ money at inane celebrity presenters.

Broughton. 1936. A modern dragon hunt on Komodo. National Geographic Magazine 70 (3, September 1936), 321-331

Soames M. 2002. Clementine Churchill, London: Doubleday

Komodo Dragons in the 1930s: a zoo quest before ‘Zoo Quest’ with links to Adolf Hitler, nazi spy scares, the FBI, a cuckolded husband and John F Kennedy

I was mystified when I came across an article in the June 1939 edition of Animal and Zoo Magazine. I have read a fair bit both scientific and popular on the natural history and history of the Komodo Dragon. Some of the popular books and articles I found to contain misprints, incorrect references and misinterpretations and none that I had found covered the story in that article from 1939.

Reading the article, entitled ‘Island of Dragons’ was the start of a search for more information but one which seemed at first attempt to lead nowhere. The article was written by Dr Paul Fejas (note the spelling ‘Fejas') and describes his attempts to capture Komodo Dragons and, under licence from the Dutch colonial government, to ship one to Stockholm Zoo and another to Copenhagen. He caught nineteen, chose two of moderate size that he thought would withstand the long journey, and released the rest. He noted that the two reached their destinations.

But who was the writer? Google searches revealed nothing but came back suggesting I meant ‘Fejos’ not ‘Fejas’. Eventually I realised that the magazine article was by Dr Paul Fejos (1897-1963). A typographical error had led me on a wild goose chase. I should not have been surprised because in the same article ‘Paranus’ instead of ‘Varanus’ is used a couple of times.

from Dodds (1973)

It was Dr Paul Fejos who collected the dragons while on Komodo to film them, thereby predating the BBC’s Zoo Quest and its same objectives by nearly twenty years. His own remarkable history is exceeded by that of Inga Arvad (1913-1973) his then wife—the subject of a recent book—a Scandinavian beauty queen, journalist and actress who interviewed Adolf Hitler and other leading nazis, who was suspected of being a German spy by the paranoid but thorough F.B.I., who became, while married to Fejos and being bugged by the F.B.I., the yet-to-be President John F. Kennedy’s lover and who, later, became a leading British politician’s short-term fiancée. 

Paul Fejos rewrote his own history so there are a number of alt-facts, i.e. lies, myths and legends, out there. His version appears in a biography that verges on a hagiography published shortly after his death; even the author of that—a friend of Fejos—did not not know what was truth and what was self-made myth. The truth seems more prosaic but nonetheless remarkable. 

Paul Fejos was born in Hungary in 1897. According to a Wikipedia biography which seems to sort the myths from reality in his early life, he served as a medical orderly in the Austrian Army on the Italian Front in the First Word War while a medical student. He graduated from the Royal Hungarian Medical University in Budapest (now Semmelweis University) in 1921 but developed a fascination for cinema and theatre, directing films, plays and operas. He never practised medicine. He left Hungary in 1923 and reached the U.S.A. via Vienna, Paris and Berlin. After manual work in a piano factory he found a job as technician at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York working for Jacques Jacob Bronfenbrenner (1883-1953) on bacteriophages. He left there for California and the hope of getting to Hollywood. The story of how he got started as a director there involves being picked up while hitchhiking by a rich man who wanted to be a film producer.

The cinema buffs’ websites describe Fejos’s successful career as a Hollywood director. But he tired of the place and returned to Europe to make early sound films. By 1934 he was in Denmark working for Nordisk (now making some of the Scandi series shown on BBC4 on Saturday nights).. It was during this time that he married, as his third wife, Inga Arvad, whom he recruited to star in one of his films. But he was tiring of fiction and while trying to get out of his contract with Nordisk persuaded them to send him to Madagascar with a cameraman but without Inga to make a documentary. Although unsuitable for a full-length feature film, the footage was used to make a series of documentaries which, by being factual rather than staged stories, earned the respect of anthropologists.

Fejos was hooked by his new interest in anthropology. He was commissioned by the Swedish Svensk Filmindistri to make a whole series of ethnographic films in Asia. In 1937 and 1938 he and Inga travelled in much of the Far East and made films in Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Ceylon and Thailand during 1937 and 1938, including the 13-minute The Komodo Dragon (Draken på Komodo). Although Inga was supposed to be radio operator and ‘script girl’ she was left at the Helena May Institute in Hong Kong when the film crew set off for Komodo. But the first landing on Komodo was a disaster—allegedly. Fejos’s motor boat lowered from a freighter into a strong current hit a reef and split in two. The three men (Fejos, camera and radio operators) swam ashore and managed only to retrieve rope and torches. They could find no water and felt doomed. But the ship that that dropped them appeared on the horizon during the night. It had gone round the island because of the state of the tide rather than sail away through the strait between Komodo and Sumbawa. Using a torch from the top of the tree they managed to signal SOS and the ship’s boat picked them up the next day. Another—this time successful—landing was made a few weeks later, with Inga being left on the neighbouring island of Sumbawa. I will return to the filming and capture of the dragons later.

Whilst in Singapore, the film party was invited on board the yacht Southern Cross by her owners, Axel and Marguerite Wenner-Gren. According to Inga’s biography, the meeting was engineered by Fejos’s sound recordist who contacted the Wenner-Grens to say that fellow Scandinavians were in Singapore making films about the East. That meeting set Fejos off in a completely new direction.

Axel Wenner-Gren was said to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. He owned Electrolux, early manufacturers of washing machines and refrigerators, and was one of the founders of Saab. Fejos and Wenner-Gren became great friends and the latter decided to finance a filming expedition to Peru in 1939. It started in Maldonado (yup, been there, tick) in the Peruvian amazon and went badly. Peruvian soldiers accompanying part of the large expedition were inveigled into helping one tribe involved in a tribal war. At least one death resulted. But while in Cusco Fejos heard reports of buried cities and obtained further funding from Wenner-Gren to explore the area along the trail to Machu Picchua and beyond. Here the expedition uncovered, mapped and photographed large and small Incan cities and roads. He also continued, between phases of the main expedition, his ethnographic filming.

While all this was going on Inga had been left in the U.S.A. Her links as a budding journalist with Hitler and other leading nazis and Wenner-Gren’s suspected support for nazi Germany (including using his vast South American holdings to advance German infiltration in South America) created the perfect storm. The F.B.I. kept a close and paranoid eye on both of them as well as on Fejos’s expedition.

It was while Fejos was in South America that Inga began her affair with John F. Kennedy. He was serving in the Office of Naval Intelligence. The F.B.I. bugged there every action and it is thought the head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, used the material to remind the then President Kennedy that he had it and that he wished to remain in post; he did.

Fejos and Inga Arvad were divorced in 1942. In the meantime, Wenner-Gren in dispute with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, set up the Viking Fund in New York to support anthropology. He endowed the fund with $2.5 million worth of shares in Electrolux and Servel (fridges and air conditioners) and appointed Paul Fejos to run it.

Eventually it was realised that neither Inga Arvad and Wenner-Gren (who had his assets frozen by the U.S. and British governments) were nazi sympathisers. The Viking Fund was re-named the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1951, Fejos remained as its head until his death in 1963. The Foundation continues to support research in anthropology.

I do not know how history has treated Paul Fejos’s reputation in his final career in ethnology and anthropology. The fact that he supported the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and his crazy notions on human evolution I could not fail to hold against him.

But back to Komodo. The article in Animal and Zoo Magazine describes how he caught the dragons and in notes published in his biography, Fejos wrote of his second landing:

     A little later I went back to the blasted island, because I decided that I wouldn't allow it to lick me. But I went back with two native sailboats and many fresh coconuts. We drank coconut water during the whole time and were able to work. Also, I brought some extra coolies with me, and we trapped the dragons in traps which we constructed on the island. They were box, gravity-fall traps; a skeleton of a box was made with wood, and then chicken wire nailed on it all around. We put a dead goat inside, and about three days later when the goat smelled to high heaven, then the dragons came down, one after the other.
     The Komodo dragon was even then a protected animal; nobody was allowed to catch or shoot one. But when I told the Java officials what we had seen, they asked me please to try to catch one for the zoo in Java, if I went back. They gave me permission to capture or kill two animals for myself and to capture one for them, which I did. When I came back, they asked me how many were on the island, and I said, “I haven't the slightest idea, but from what I saw and the frequency of the encounter, maybe three or four hundred, maybe more.

'Having slipped a noose around your dragon's neck your difficulties
are only just starting, as the picture below shows'
Animal and Zoo Magazine

'Though equipped with formidable teeth the dragon's most powerful weapon
is his scaly tail'

'The wire trap is set with its inviting bait of goat or deer, and when caught,
the dragon still needs careful watching, for it is very cunning.

     Of the two we captured and kept, one went to the Zoological Gardens in Stockholm, and one went to the Zoological Gardens in Copenhagen, where in due course they died, not from illness or climate, but from visitors. Some stupid visitor threw beer caps into the place and they ate them. One of them had a perforated intestine; we performed an autopsy on him later. The one which went to Stockholm was 14½ feet long, the Copenhagen one 13 feet.

There is a photograph of the one sent to Copenhagen but by this time stuffed and on display in the museum. 

from Dodds (1973)

Fejos’s collecting activities are not mentioned in The Living Dragon by Dick and Marie Lutz. The authors suggest that the Stockholm and Copenhagen specimens were obtained by de Jong in 1937 who collected on Flores and possibly Komodo and who supplied a number of zoos with specimens. Clearly we now know the ones in Stockholm and Copenhagen came from Fejos.

Readers in Britain of a certain age will be puzzled to learn which well-known politician was Inga briefly affianced. It was Robert Boothby, later Lord Boothby, the ambisexual ‘bounder but not a cad’ who was the long-term lover of the Prime Minister’s wife, Dorothy Macmillan, and acquaintance—at least—of the notorious Kray twins.

So having had a celebrity magazine tour of the 1930s and 40s, I found that having searched fruitlessly for the misprinted name above the main article, Animal and Zoo Magazine had go it right, as Fejos, in the list of contents on the first page!

Paul Fejos in 1962
by Robert Fuchs (in oils)
(reproduced in Dodds, 1963)

Dodds JW. 1973. The Several Lives of Paul Fejos. Wnnner-Gren Foundation. (John Wendell Dodds 1902-1989, Stanford University)*

Dodds JW. 1963. Eulogy for Paul Fejos. Current Anthropology 4, 405-406*

Farris, S. Inga. Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect. Guilford, Connecticut: LP

Fejas [sic] P. 1939. Island of Dragons. Animal and Zoo Magazine 4 (1, June 1939) 4-6

Lutz D, Lutz JM. 1997. The Living Dragon. 2nd edition. Salem, Oregon: DIMI Press

*When I bought the biography for a song from a bookseller, the eulogy was found folded inside together with a letter which began:

The Wenner-Gren Foundation is pleased to send you with its compliments this copy of The Several Lives of Paul Fejos. This limited edition is being distributed to many of the Foundation’s past and current grantees, to those who have helped the Foundation over the years in the design and execution of its programs, and to others who will want to gain insight into the traditions of the Foundation’s philosophy, style and approach.

Unfortunately, the book bears no signature or plate so I do not know who the recipient was.

Komodo Dragon: extending the saliva story

The previous post generated a number of emails on the use of biologically-active substances in saliva by the Komodo Dragon to help kill its prey, ranging from ‘unnecessary and highly speculative’ to ‘generally supportive but needs more work’. I was also told that the post seemed somewhat harsh. It was not meant that way but I think my style in writing it reflects the sort of debate that has arisen and the tone adopted by some authors and commentators. The comments/replies on a paper* are as robust as any I have seen in print for a long time.

Much of the controversy centres on use of the terms ‘venom’, ‘venomous’ and ‘venom glands’. I will not go into the arguments further here but there is a long-standing problem in naming structures or molecules for presumed or first-discovered function, potential function or partial function. The names of hormones and growth factors are well-known nightmares in this regard. There are actually two hypotheses, one an evolutionary question on the stage at which reptiles acquired the capacity to produce venom—the Toxicoferon Hypothesis—and the related but distinct question of how the Komodo Dragon (and possibly other extant and extinct monitor lizards) kills its prey. This latter question is susceptible to morphological, chemical, physiological and pharmacological observation and experiment as demonstrated by Bryan Fry and his international team in their original paper. I will restrict myself to expanding the dragon story.

Typical Komodo Dragon habitat on the island of Rinca, part of the Komodo
National Park, with gullies and open areas of grassland

My own view is that there is a chain of events by which biologically active substances in saliva could be used to decrease the time between initial attack and death of the large mammal prey. At present, though, I see a gap in knowledge between a scenario which describes what could happen and one that describes what does happen. I also see it as a gap that could be filled and which, if filled, would subdue further objections and a great deal of speculation on alternative roles for biologically active substances in the Dragon’s saliva.

There is strong evidence in favour of saliva doing something—and something deleterious to the life of the prey. The presence of a relatively large lumen in the mandibular gland where secretion can be stored is highly suggestive of the use of a ready store of saliva when a dragon attacks prey, and a store that can be delivered to the base of the teeth. The authors of the original papers also showed by direct biological assays that dragon saliva has components that act to cause vasodilatation and decrease blood pressure and to contain substances that are potent anticoagulants.

Therefore, a good case has been made for local effects of biologically-active substances on the wound inflicted by the dragon—parallel deep slashes inflicted by pulling after the initial bite. Diffusion into the tissues surrounding the wound would increase the rate of blood loss and keep the severed ends of large and small arteries open and the blood flowing from all severed vessels. That’s where the relatively low bite strength of the Dragon which was demonstrated by Fry and his collaborators would be of selective advantage. If the Dragon bites, pulls what have been described as its steak-knife teeth across blood vessels (‘grip-and-rip’), and holds that grip, the last thing it needs is a strong bite. Compression by a strong bite would compress the wound and slow the rate of blood loss. Moreover, it would decrease the rate of movement of substances from the saliva away from the wound into surrounding tissues and into the circulation through venous or lymphatic drainage.

So, as far as local actions of saliva are concerned, they must be present and I can think of experiments that would test how far diffusion would take them into surrounding tissues. 

Central effects, for example, in decreasing blood pressure, would be harder but not impossible to demonstrate, as would establishing the concentrations of substances from saliva in the peripheral circulation of the prey in order to determine whether they reach the levels required to exert the effect that can be demonstrated with particular concentrations in biological assay systems. The latter is not a trivial question with substances that would be appearing in the circulation relatively slowly from a wound and which may be relatively quickly broken down into inactive compounds.

The presence of several compounds known to be part of the arsenal of toxins deployed by classic venomous reptiles adds weight to the suggestion of some systemic role for Dragon saliva in the bitten animal. Others have suggested that may may fulfil other roles in the mouth or in digestion of the prey before ingestion and the action of stomach enzymes; I do not find the latter argument compelling although it could be tested experimentally.

So, while demonstration of central toxic events has not yet been attempted, there must be a local effect of saliva, at least, on the gripped-and-ripped prey. The question that remains on this local action is whether the effect is biologically significant in shortening the life or ability to resist of the animal that has been ambushed, or is so in a sufficiently large number of attacks as to confer a selective advantage.

Both local and systemic actions rely on getting saliva into the wound. Different durations of bites could have different effects. The mandibular gland implicated in storage seems to work in a similar way to that of back-fanged snakes in that the pressure exerted by chewing forces the secretion out. If that is so then a ‘grip-and-rip’ feeding attack could have an entirely different outcome from a quick offensive or defensive nip.

Some commentators have suggested testing the components of Dragon saliva on their natural prey. However, what is their natural prey? Water Buffalo were introduced relatively recently, Timor Deer in antiquity while domestic goats are, well, domestic. The Komodo Dragon and its extinct relatives appear to have been around the Indonesian islands, where they spread from Australia, even before the now extinct dwarf elephant appeared in their habitat so that fundamental mismatch between the bulk and apparent adaptations for killing large animals of Komodo Dragons and the size of potential prey species seems to be unexplained.

Other questions arise like are there differences between the sexes in the size of prey and feeding strategies, adult females being lighter than males? Do juvenile Dragons attack prey that is larger than that attempted by, say, Water Monitors (Varanus salvator) of similar size and, if so, would that make the use of saliva as a chemical weapon to help in subduing prey more likely? In other words, the advantage may come more to juveniles tackling large prey than to adults. Indeed, if other species such as the Lace Monitor or Goanna (Varanus varius) from Australia have a similar array of potential biological agents, which seems to be the case, and in quantitatively equivalent amounts, might the whole arrangement be an adaptation to extend in size the range of prey that can be killed and eaten by some or all monitor lizards?

So, after arguing with myself several times and learning lots about venomous and non-venomous reptiles, that’s may take on the Komodo Dragon’s feeding method in the light of present evidence. In essence, I argue that the available evidence points to a local chemical role for saliva in helping to subdue/kill large prey (while recognising that sheer physical force may often or sometimes be sufficient). As for toxins in saliva having a systemic effect on the prey, I argue that the gap between the prima facie potential effect and actual effect has not yet been filled by experimental data. And as to whether we should call Dragons ‘venomous’ or the gland the ‘venom’ gland…

...I will leave to others.

Whatever the final outcome on these fascinating and enigmatic lizards, the authors of the 2009 paper have done a signal service in examining how it and other extinct and extant monitor lizards kill their prey and have not shied from erecting hypotheses on possible mechanisms and their wider importance in the evolution of reptiles. 


*Fry BG, Casewell NR, Wüster W, Vidal N, Young B, Jackson TNW. 2012. The structural and functional diversification of the Toxicofera reptile venom system. Toxicon 60, 434-448. Weinstein SA, Keyler DE, White J. 2012. Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012, 60/4 434-448). Part A. Analyses of squamate reptile oral glands and their products: A call for caution in formal assignment of terminology designating biological function, Toxicon 60, 954-963. Kardong KV. 2013. Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012 60/4 434-448). Part B. Properties and biological roles of squamate oral products: The “venomous lifestyle” and preadaptation, Toxicon 63, 113-115. Jackson TNW, Casewell NR, Fry BG. 2013. Response to “Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012, 60/4, 434–448). Part A. Analyses of squamate reptile oral glands and their products: A call for caution in formal assignment of terminology designating biological function”, Toxicon 64, 106-112. Weinstein SA, White J, Keyler DE, Kardong KV. 2013. Response to Jackson et al. (2012), Toxicon 64, 116-127.

Komodo Dragons. A peaceful morning in the Komodo National Park and an acrimonious debate on reptilian venoms

Last September’s Expedition Cruise from Darwin through the Lesser Sunda islands of East Timor and Indonesia included stops at Rinca and Komodo. Ever since my fourth cousin once removed visited Komodo in 1956 I have wanted to see Komodo Dragons alive and in their natural habitat. They did not disappoint. We saw very large males (hanging out around the kitchen of the ranger station on Rinca hoping for a hand out), females and juveniles (but not the hatchlings which apparently take to the trees to avoid their predatory parents). One female was digging out the nest mound of a megapode, the Orange-footed Scrubfowl (Megapodius reinwardt) in which to lay her own eggs, September being the egg-laying time in their breeding cycle.

When we got back I had a chance to look at and think about the various hypotheses that have been advanced as to how Komodo Dragons—and, possibly, some other monitor lizards—kill their prey. The highly publicised but never properly tested proposal that Komodo Dragons are venomous in the sense that venomous snakes are venomous, i.e. toxins delivered by injection having a very or fairly rapid systemic effect on the prey, seems to be in the process of being discarded in the course of some pretty acrimonious arguments, along with the associated hypothesis of a single, early origin of venom in reptilian evolution—the Toxicofera hypothesis. The other idea, that pathogenic bacteria harboured in the mouth of dragons causes sepsis in prey animals that are bitten but escape the initial attack, doesn’t seem that convincing or special given the likelihood of infection from a bite from any animal, as any postman will testify, especially if that postman were to immerse his bitten ankle in fetid water, as non-native water buffalo do when bitten by a Dragon. If I were to bite a Timor Deer on the leg, there is every likelihood an infected wound that could impede mobility would ensue. 

Given the opposition to the Toxicofera hypothesis and the contentious nature of the evidence for Komodo Dragons being venomous, it seems a pity that the BBC repeated last November the screening of an episode from its 2011-12 season of the Natural World Series called Komodo—Secrets of the Dragon that was devoted virtually entirely to that proposition and its main protagonist. Had this been a programme about a topic other than science-led natural history the BBC would have been falling over itself to show someone with the opposite view, however perverse. As it is, the viewing public in Britain has been left with the impression that the venomous nature of the Dragon is accepted. At the very least the BBC should have been aware of what was going on (by reading Wikipedia for example) and before rescreening it should have added an annex to the original programme. That annex could have  explained the opposing views and evidence—some of which made news media reports*—that have been accumulating since 2009. Adam Hargreaves (Oxford), Abigail Tucker (King’s, London) and John Mulley (Bangor), who produced a devastating critique** of the toxicoferan hypothesis in 2015, should have been consulted and involved. But let’s leave the BBC and its usually excellent (but sometimes spectacularly poor) natural history programmes and return to the mouth of the dragon.

None of the criticisms of the venom hypothesis imply that the composition and quantity of saliva are not of selective advantage to the despatch of prey, subsequent swallowing and digestion or protection of the oral cavity against infection. Nor, indeed, do they refute the idea or evidence that saliva may have local beneficial—to the Dragon—effects on inflicted wounds, like the application of a secreted anticoagulant, for example.

The drooling mouths of some of the male Dragons we saw were impressive. The only comparable example I could think of was my late mother-in-law’s Boxer dogs given the slightest hint of finding something edible. With no obvious sign of food or feeding activity, is Dragon saliva being used for some other purpose like scent marking?

The accumulated data that I have found suggests to me that Komodo Dragons, as originally thought, kill their prey by sheer brute force from wounds inflicted by a very large mouth with very big teeth. In one study†, 17 attacks on large prey were observed, 12 were fatal. Of the 5 that escaped with injuries to their limbs and rump, 1 was quickly attacked and killed by a second Dragon, 2 died within hours, one fled being pursued by other Dragons and one limped away without being pursued. The eventual fate of the two that possibly survived is not known.

One may though ask how, if the Komodo Dragon originally preyed upon the now extinct dwarf elephant, Stegodon, of Flores, as suggested in 1987 by Jared Diamond, those beasts (smaller than a domestic water buffalo) were killed? Would biologically-active substances in saliva have been of selective advantage?

Nowhere have I found (but I am not have looked in the right place) any discussion of the selective benefits of a slow death of the prey to the predator. A snake with a fast-acting neurotoxin can quickly track and swallow its prey without that investment in metabolically expensive venom being lost to another snake or any old predator happening to find the corpse. But let’s say a Dragon does inject toxins with a small bite and the animal runs away to die. There is no guarantee that the investment in venom would pay off. With lots of other Dragons around, the prey could be lost entirely or the original killer would get only a small share in a communal but competitive feeding session. Surely, if monitor lizards are venomous at all then why have they not evolved a more effective venom to ensure a quick kill?

The venomous dragon and other monitor lizards hypothesis has been around now for ten years. I find it sad that so little has been done at the whole animal and tissue levels to test it. I found some of the original observations and experiments‡ unconvincing. But given the captive populations of Dragons and a local abundance on Komodo and Rinca, a rigorous examination of the whole question cannot be beyond the bounds of practical realisation or funding.

*e.g. Zimmer C. 2009. Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate. New York Times, 18 May 2009. Yong E. 2015. A Venomous Fight Among Reptile Scientists. The Atlantic, 2 November 2015

*Hargreaves AD, Tucker, AS, Mulley JF. 2015. A critique of the toxicoferan hypothesis. In, Gopalakrishnakone P (ed), Malhotra M (ed). A critique of the toxicoferan hypothesis. In Evolution of Venomous Animals and Their Toxins: Toxicology. Springer Netherlands, p 1-15. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6727-0_4-1

†Bull JJ, Jessop TS, Whiteley M. 2010. Deathly drool: evolutionary and ecological basis of septic bacteria in Komodo Dragon mouths. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11097. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011097

‡Fry BG Wroec S, Teeuwisse W, van Osch MJP, Moreno K, Ingle J, McHenry C, Ferrara T, Clausen P, Scheib H, Winter KL, Greisman L., Roelants K, van der Weer L, Clemente CJ, Giannakis E, Hodgson WC, Luz S, Martelli P, Krishnasamy K, Kochva E, Kwok H, Scanlon D, Karas J, Citron DM, Goldstein EJC, Mcnaughtan JE, Norman JA. 2009. A central role for venom in predation by Varanus komodoensis (Komodo Dragon) and the extinct giant Varanus (Megalania) priscus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 106, 8969-8974 doi 10.1073 pnas.0810883106