The final season of Game of Thrones is in full swing, and most of the show’s major players are currently awaiting the Night King and his army at Winterfell. The new season has already seen a lot of unlikely pairings, including a few tense moments between Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). One scene in the first episode of the new season saw Sansa asking the question, “What do dragons eat, anyway?,” to which Dany replied, “Whatever they want.” Thanks to Eater.com‘s inquiry with a zoologist, we now have a better idea of what a dragon’s diet could look like.
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“My inclination would be to say that they are strict carnivores, based on looking at their skull,” Leslie Storer, a zoological manager at the Oakland Zoo, shared. Storer “inspected” photos of the Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion, and determined that the mythical creature’s eating habits “likely resemble those of carnivorous monitor lizards, like Komodo dragons.”
“Their dentition does not imply that they do any kind of grinding of plant material,” she explained. “There’s no grinding molars like we have as omnivores, and no grinding molars like herbivores would have, like cows.”
The article goes on to point out that since the dragons are meat-eaters, they probably won’t need to break for snacks during the upcoming battle.
“Carnivores tend not to eat that often, as opposed to herbivores, whom you see grazing all the time, because they have to glean little bits of nutrients out of mass quantities of food,” Storer explained. “And some reptiles have been known to go surprisingly, shockingly long times without eating anything — days, weeks, months, that kind of stuff. Depending on how fast their metabolism is, they might go an entire season without eating — many, many months — and then their metabolism speeds up again, and then they eat again.”
Apparently, “reptile metabolism slows down in colder weather,” which means Dany doesn’t have to worry too much about their diet during the fight. However, Eater.com does point out that they might be a danger to some of her soldiers.
“I would think that’s a possibility,” Storer adds. “Because if one of the members of your own army happens to be in the wrong place, maybe it’s not one of the people that the dragon has a relationship with and knows, ‘Oh, I listen to this person.’ And if they see another army person as a snack, and this person happens to be within range… I would definitely consider that to be worrying if I was a member of that army.”
While plot details surrounding the highly-anticipated Battle of Winterfell are scarce, there has been some extreme hints from the cast that it’s going to be the most intense and gruesome battle we’ve seen on the show.
“It’s brutal,” Peter Dinklage, who stars in the series as Tyrion Lannister, explained in a previous interview. “It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park.”
Game of Thrones airs Sunday nights on HBO TV at 9pm EST.
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