Surviving Dragons: Ethnographic Reports of Komodo Monitors ( <i>Varanus komodoensis</i> ) in Northeastern Flores
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Besides their namesake island and several immediately neighboring small islands, Komodo monitors (Varanus komodoensis )—better known as Komodo dragons—also occur on the larger island of Flores to the east. Apart from the extreme western part of Flores, the giant lizards occur along the island's northern coast; but how far eastward they extend remains a question. Early in the twentieth century, reports by local people described dragons as present in the northeast, while in 1985, officials of the Indonesian department of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation reported catching specimens of V. komodoensis in the vicinity of Cape Kotabaru in northeastern Flores. Camera trapping conducted between 2014 and 2019 by field zoologists failed to produce evidence of dragons in this region. Yet, during recent ethnographic research, the present author recorded reports of local people encountering specimens in Kotabaru. In view of locally recognized differences between Komodo dragons and the related, though much smaller, water monitor (Varanus salvator ), the present study discusses local knowledge of Komodo dragons among the Lio people of northeastern Flores as a prelude to reviewing local sighting reports, some from as recently as 2016 and 2017. With regard to mostly anthropogenic factors that would account for recent decline in dragon numbers throughout Flores Island, as well as features of the species that render it resilient to these, the paper concludes that a small number of dragons remain in the Kotabaru region, so that recent sighting reports are likely valid.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".