Photo: Kahfi Irawan (Shutterstock)
Komodo dragons are the second worst animals on earth, behind bedbugs, so you should only use them as examples of how to not live your life. Do not bite into your prey and rip its flesh apart while injecting venom. Do not dig up the graves of humans and eat their corpses.
When it comes to parenting, Komodo dragons get off to a good start—they can reproduce asexually, and they build safe nests to lay their eggs—but once the eggs hatch, it’s all bad. As soon as they are born, young Komodo dragons run as fast as they can toward a tree. If they climb fast enough, they are safe. The slow babies are eaten by their own mothers or other dragons. To protect themselves from their own kind, the tree-living Komodo dragons roll around in feces to be unappetizing. They stay in the trees for four years, until they are strong and vicious enough to hold their own. They then drop to earth and spend their remaining 25 years being terrible.
