Here There Be Dragons

Solution 1:

In the early days of cartography, when many regions were unknown and uncharted, the cartographer would frequently draw a dragon or a sea monster where no information was available about the geography of that region. This was at a time when there was still some degree of mythology, and many genuinely believed that there were dragons and sea monsters in the world.

The phrase and the drawings did serve an important purpose, however. When one is in uncharted waters, a higher level of caution is warranted, because there are likely to be hazards that are not yet known which could indeed jeopardize the safety of a ship and its crew.

The term is somewhat analogous to the story in the Odyssey of the Scylla and Charybdis, the "rock and a hard place", which Odysseus' ship was compelled to sail between, where there were two very real but poorly understood hazards. They were both described as monsters on opposite sides of a narrow strait, when in reality, one was a whirlpool and the other was a treacherously rocky coast. Those two hazards were compounded by the fast currents within the strait that could push a ship toward either of the hazards. Many ships were destroyed by these hazards, and the tall tales of the day led sailors to imagine, and then spread rumors, of monsters that were wreaking havoc intentionally.

Thus the phrase "here there be dragons" gradually came into being, as a metaphor representing man's fear of the unknown, which was partly based in reason, and partly based in irrational exaggeration of a threat that was poorly understood and was therefore thought to be worse than it actually was, to the extent of becoming supernaturally menacing in the imaginations of explorers.

In the context of this particular headline, it is a double entendre, on the one hand referring to the Komodo dragons themselves, and on the other hand referring to the fact that when a region became commonly traversed, and the hazards that were present became well understood and easily avoided, the illusion of dragons vanished, just as certain rare species, like Komodo dragons, sometimes also vanish due to increasing human traffic and population, but in this case, the dragons vanish due to loss of habitat rather than loss of imaginary supernatural dangers through better understanding of the real hazard.