There Be Dragons!
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2010Definitely breaking new ground around here. A recent paper in PLoS ONE examines the hypotheses surrounding the ecology and evolution of Komodo Dragon saliva. For those of you whose Komodo Dragonology is a little bit rusty, the saliva of Komodo Dragons can lead to infections that weaken or even kill prey that survive the original attack. Until this paper, there were two models to account for deadly drool:
1) Bacteria-as-venom model. The salivary bacteria are beneficial to the lizards, since they act as a de facto venom.
2) Passive acquisition model. Salivary bacteria are acquired from…