I was watching one of those animal planet documentaries yesterday and this one featured the commodore dragon.
There was a shot in it where they showed the commodore dragons, I think they were three of them, approach a buffalo wallowing in the mud. The dragons kept trying to bite a buffalo, and after several attempts managed to bring the buffalo down.
The buffalo seemed to be in good health and could stand and walk. It also managed to avoid and fend off attacks by kicking the dragons sometimes.
What I could not understand was that even after being bitten by the dragons a couple of time, the buffalo did not make any effort to walk away!! This ‘hunting’ by the dragons must have continued for not less than 5 minutes. The dragons appeared to be slow and lumbering creatures and would definitely not have been able to catch the buffalo even it sauntered away.
I have seen similar trends in other documentaries too. For example there was one in which a bunch of wildebeest are drinking on the bank of a river and a croc pops up and drags one of them away. The rest of them jump back and then are right back to drinking as if nothing happened.
Aren’t these actions somehow against evolution which would at least teach them to sense and avoid danger?
I saw the show. It was “Life” on the Discovery Channel. The KIomodo dragon inflicted a nasty bite on the buffalo’s ankle. The bites are venomous and the buffalo eventually succumbed. However, I agree that it was strange that such a large and powerful animal did essentially nothing to defend itself against the Komodo dragon, even when it became clear that the dragon intended to attack. The buffalo has a kick that could break the dragon’s skull, and horns that could skewer it. It didn’t even try to run away.
Don’t trust the editing of a nature documentary as an accurate portrayal of events. There’s possibly extenuating circumstances that would fill in the blanks and have the situation make more sense.
Now, CookingWithGas, I heard that there’s show about these dragons. Is that true?
Anyway, at some point (possibly in the behind the scenes bit at the end) someone says that that was the only watering hole in the area, so maybe the buffalo figured that was a good as it got, dragons included. And once the buffalo gets bit, he’s really not going anywhere soon.
Also mentioned in the documentary was the fact that it took 4 weeks for the buffalo to finally weaken and die with up to ten dragons constantly watching it. What I wondered was why the dragons didn’t continue to bite it. Too much risk at that point?
The buffalo may well have been drugged for the purposes of the documentary. That’s not exactly unheard of. The TV show “Survivor” in one of the early episodes provided a rather obviously drugged pig for one of the contestants to slaughter.
Remember, the vast majority of these shows are made first as money-spinning entertainment. Only the very highest quality examples actually spend months and tens of thousands of dollars obtaining the 30 seconds of footage they end up using. The rest will quite happily stage whatever shots they want in whatever way they can. And if they can get a required shot in two days by buying a buffalo at the local market and and drugging the animal so it can be eaten by dragon on camera, then that’s what they will do.
You’d have to wonder if it would achieve anything. If it took 4 weeks to die then it obviously wasn’t through blood loss. So biting it again isn’t going to make it die any faster.
I always figured that there’s a instinctive understanding that group survives while an individual dies; if Animal so-and-so is killed, it really doesn’t matter to the group – and the group, of course, is crucial for survival of the species, not the individual.
However, if all the individuals would think: I can’t drink from that river, there’s crocodiles there!, then the whole group perish. So, everyone instinctively flinch when the croc kills so-and-so, but everyone has the “evolutionary memory” if you will, that this happens from time to time, but it is not a threat to the group. So they go back, and drink again as if nothing happened.
This is the problem when they meet “the white man”. Unlike the full croc, he won’t stop killing, and so the buffalo is exterminated. They had no memory of that, it hasn’t happened before.
Wow, Blake. A bit hostile? He offered his suggestion just like you did. You didn’t offer any cite backing up claim that it may have been drugged. No, I don’t care if you give me one. But no one really attacked your suggestion, maybe you should pump the brakes.
First of all, it was the “white man” (European descendants) that was responsible for wiping out most American Bison.
Second, as for Wakinyan’s idea, after reading The Selfish Gene not too long ago I’ve been convinced enough to lean towards believing that it’s gene survival strategies and not group survival strategies that control the evolution of species.
Ouch! Racist and all. - I have no evidence for my claim, that’s why I started with “I always figured”. I don’t think we know all about how instincts work, by the way. This isn’t the end of science. Therefore you are allowed to speculate. It wasn’t my intent to hurt anybody.
[QUOTE=AClockworkMelon;12255600First of all, it was the “white man” (European descendants) that was responsible for wiping out most American Bison.[/quote]
Bollocks, the vast majority of both bison species and individual bison were killed by Indians.
Even if what you say were true, so what? Most of the crack cocaine in the US is sold by clack men. If I made a totally baseless and illogical post that that urban children fear the dark because of their fear of “the Black man”, would you also think that acceptable? A racist slur is a racist slur. Just because the race is white doesn’t make it any better.
There is no rivers there in the dry season just small puddles of water, it eventually gets down to one hundred percent chance die of thirst vs ninety nine percentage chance get eaten by a dragon.
