ZooTampa has six, scaly new babies to take care off.
This morning, the zoo said that for the first time in its history, it has hatched endangered Komodo dragons.
The parents—13-year-old female Aanjay and 12-year-old Titus—welcomed the six new additions on Aug. 21 after a nine-month incubation, according to a press release. The clutch includes six hatchlings, three male and three female, each about 10 inches long and weighing in at about 100 grams, or about the weight of four AA batteries.
The zoo said the babies will not be on public display until later this fall.
“These first-time additions at the Zoo are a big win for conservation,” Dan Costell, associate curator of Herpetology at ZooTampa, wrote in the release. “It was a long process, and we are excited that these additions to a key endangered species are finally here.”
While the hatchlings are a first for ZooTampa, zoos in Spain and England saw the birth of Komodo dragons earlier this year. Roughly 1,400 adult Komodo dragons exist in the wild.
Komodo dragon eggs are about the size of a goose egg, and ZooTampa’s herpetology and veterinary teams used candling and genetic testing to monitor the eggs’ viability and determine the sex of the hatchlings. The baby dragons can grow up to 10 feet and weight up to 200 pounds, and a rep for ZooTampa told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that the zoo’s herpetology team, which worked tirelessly to make the hatching happen, will get the first opportunity to name them.
“But we’re exploring options where the public can be involved in the process,” Sandra Morrison, ZooTampa’s Director of Communications, added.
