For my inaugural post, I would like to address a recent question as well as a long-standing myth that has fascinated me since childhood. During a trip to Año Nuevo State Park in Northern California to see hordes of elephant seals, I watched a team of UC Santa Cruz researchers cautiously maneuver between some ornery cows (female elephant seals). A nearby docent told me that the researchers had to be careful because the mouths of the elephant seals contained flesh-eating bacteria, and if a researcher happened to be bit, they must receive medical treatment right away.
Who knew that elephant seals could be so deadly? Well besides the quarrelsome probocis-wielding males. The docent telling me about this mysterious zoonotic pathogen, a microbe that can spill over from animals to humans and cause disease, reminded me of another story I heard while watching nature documentaries as a kid. However, in this other story the dirty mouths of Komodo dragons were responsible. I remember hearing multiple times that the deadly bacteria in the mouths of Komodo dragons are what kill prey and even humans after a single bite from a Komodo dragon. Supposedly these bacteria come from the rotting flesh that Komodo dragons feast on.
Wondering about whether the mouths of elephant seals also contain deadly bacteria, I briefly searched the scientific literature, and I could not find any evidence. However, what I did find was the truth about the mouths of Komodo dragons. And the truth is, these poor gigantic reptiles have been the victims of a longstanding fallacy! The mouths of Komodo dragons actually contain venom and aren't as dirty as people think. An infectious disease physician and an Australian scientist teamed up to identify the bacteria within the mouths of Komodo dragons as well as their venom glands—the source of their deadly bite.
Although I still haven't found anything to exonerate or incriminate the mouths of elephant seals, this myth about Komodo dragons makes me wonder where these stories come from and what other assumptions about human and animal health have not been thoroughly investigated.
I hope to use this blog as a platform to explore and expose different stories about our health, environment, and education, and I hope that you find these connections as interesting as I do.
Here is a link to the scientific paper about the mouths of Komodos : http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1638/2012-0022R.1
And the National Geographic article that shattered my childhood beliefs:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/27/the-myth-of-the-komodo-dragons-dirty-mouth/