The Dutch administration of Komodo Island, realizing the limited number of Varanus individuals in the wild, has prohibited hunting and severely limited the number of individuals taken for scientific research.

The outbreak of World War II temporarily put scientific expeditions on hold; they were resumed in the 1950s and 1960s to study their feeding and breeding behaviors.

The expedition of Walter Auffenberg in 1969 aimed at studying Komodo dragons in terms of captive breeding.