Komodo dragons were not confirmed venomous until 2009, when magnetic resonance imaging exposed paired venom glands in the lower jaw. Science had credited septic mouth bacteria for a century. The correction reframed Varanus komodoensis, the three-metre monitor that lends its name to a park now reached by travellers on full day tour to komodo island by speed boat to explore 6 destinations tours departing Labuan Bajo. Indonesia declared the park in 1980, initially to protect a single lizard. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1991, following its designation as a Man and Biosphere Reserve in 1977. The boundaries enclose 1,733 square kilometres, of which roughly 603 are land. Three large islands — Komodo, Rinca and Padar — sit among 26 smaller ones. About 3,000 dragons survive across them. Nowhere else on earth does the species live wild. The village of Komodo, home to fishing families for generations, sits inside the boundary. Local oral tradition tells of a woman named Putri Naga who bore twins, one human and one dragon, a story that kept the animal unhunted long before any statute did. The archipelago is volcanic, dry, and stranded inside Wallacea, the transition zone Alfred Russel Wallace mapped between Asian and Australian fauna. Monsoon shadow keeps the hills brown for eight months of the year, lontar palms scattered across savanna that looks transplanted from Africa. Padar's three crescent bays meet at a spine of ridgeline, each beach a different shade of sand: black, white, and pale rose. Below the waterline the arithmetic changes. Marine biologists count more than 260 reef-building coral species, 70 sponges and roughly 1,000 fish. At Manta Point, reef mantas with four-metre wingspans queue at cleaning stations. Pink Beach owes its colour to Homotrema rubrum, a red foraminiferan crushed into white sand. A Komodo National Park speedboat itinerary crosses all of it inside one tide. That density is also the pressure. Rangers still walk visitors in small groups with forked staffs, a method essentially unchanged since the 1980s, and every full day tour to komodo island by speed boat to explore 6 destinations tour is escorted by them. Conservation is funded partly by the marine park entry fee of 250,000 IDR per person per day for foreign visitors. Wisata Pulau Komodo has grown quickly; the park's answer has been quotas, ranger escorts and rotating trail closures rather than fences. The dragons, meanwhile, keep their venom and their indifference.