As a fully grown adult, a Komodo dragon is a formidable 10-foot (3-metre), 200-pound (90-kilogram) predator, whose steak-knife teeth and sizeable claws can bring down large prey, and whose bulk and chain-mail skin make it impervious to everything except humans. But when it first hatches, a Komodo is just a hand-sized lizard that weighs a tenth of a kilogram, hides in trees, and relies on mottled scales for camouflage. It takes around a decade reach its final form.

What happens during those years?

To find out, Deni Purwandana and Achmad Ariefiandy from the Komodo Survival Program, a Indonesian non-profit, have been monitoring the lizards in the wild since 2002. They’ve watched at least 25 individually identified dragons taking down their prey.