How to Make Your Dragon
Recipe: a pinch of controversy, 1 tbsp of fire, 1/2 cup of science, and a whole lot of optimism.
By the end of this recipe, you should be able to make your own fire-breathing dragon.
A pinch of controversy.
While my friends’ pets of choice seem to be dogs, cats, or the occasional hamster, my answer to the pet question has always been a snake. And that’s only because I can’t have a dragon. I mean, just look at this:
Who wouldn’t want their own dragon?
So, I’ve been wondering what the closest pet I could get to a dragon would be. A bird? Maybe a lizard or snake or another reptile? Some can fly, some look similar, but none breathe fire. And that’s what I’m looking to figure out.
1 tbsp of fire.
I remember asking my high school biology teacher how we could get an animal to breathe fire. And he didn’t quite have an answer to the question. So, I watched back a couple of dragon scenes from Game of Thrones—my preferred scientific source—and noticed that the origin of the fire seemed to build in the mouth/throat of the dragon before it was sprayed out. Importantly, it was a spray. There seemed to be a liquid that caught fire as it left the dragon’s mouth. That got me thinking.
The next day, I went back to my biology teacher with an idea—a rough idea, but still an idea. What if there were 2 organs in the throat or mouth of this potential dragon that acted as production and storage glands of chemical binary agents—substances that are harmless when individual, but dangerous when put together? There could be 2 chemical solutions that are involved in a highly exothermic reaction, or the ignition could be a result of a highly pressurized release. My teacher said it's not the worst idea, but that, of course, it is a very fantastical situation.
But recently, I came across a little animal that might make my hypothesis sound a bit more realistic.
1/2 cup of science.
Lots of animals have defence mechanisms, but the bombardier beetle’s chemical defence is truly special.
If the colouration of this insect isn’t enough of a warning signal, the bombardier beetle has some specialized organs that might give us a gateway to understanding how we could make a fire-breathing dragon.
In the abdomen of this beetle, 2 large glands contain catalase and peroxidase enzymes and have stored reservoir solutions of hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. When the beetle feels threatened, it opens a valve which allows for the enzymes to facilitate the decomposition and oxidation of the chemicals in the solutions, leading to a highly exothermic reaction, reaching temperatures high enough to boil water.
The chemicals used in this reaction, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone are hypergolic compounds, substances that spontaneously ignite when brought together. Thus, we can apply a similar system to the bombardier beetle to help our dragon breathe fire, giving it 2 similar organs in its mouth to spray fire. Opening the valve for those glands will shoot out chemical solutions that spontaneously react to ignite outside of the dragon’s mouth. And voila, fire breathing.
Perhaps it’ll need some mucus or other secretory substance to minimize the burns the dragon might feel in its mouth, but the mechanism for fire-breathing, or at least something very close, already exists in nature.
A whole lot of optimism.
The issue we face now is putting it all together, and y’know, actually making the dragon. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in genetic engineering, but I do happen to be an occasional expert in optimism.
What we’re looking for here is to create a chimera, a single organism that contains cells from multiple different species. If you’ve ever played games like Dragon City or Monster Legends, this is sort of like the breeding function, where you take traits from two species of organisms and mash them together to make a new organism featuring a combination of their parents’ traits.
In reality, to pull this off would be an incredible (and scary) feat. But, we’re not so far out. We’ve already got well-established, and still ever-improving technologies for gene editing in CRISPR. We’ve been able to grow intelligent brain tissue in petri dishes. We have plans to bring some extinct animals back to life. And recently, we’ve even been able to create an animal-human hybrid for the first time, which you can learn more about here. Something tells me it won’t be too unrealistic to slap together a lizard, bird, and bombardier beetle soon and get ourselves a real fire-breathing dragon.
All I know is that once that happens, I’m getting the first one.
If you want a demonstration of how the bombardier beetle uses its defence mechanism in the wild, check out this great short video from MIT!
