How Much Do the ‘Game of Thrones’ Dragons Actually Need to Eat? An Investigation

If the heroes of Game of Thrones want to defeat the frozen zombie hordes from beyond the wall, they’re going to need to keep their dragons well fed — a task that might prove particularly difficult once battle kicks into high gear.

In the Season 8 premiere, Winterfell leather goth Sansa Stark questions her brother Jon Snow’s decision to bring his pushy new girlfriend (and aunt!) Daenerys and her two dragons to the north, wondering out loud what precisely the dragons are going to eat. The Mother of Dragons smugly replies, “Whatever they want.” (Which, judging from past episodes, includes a lot of animal herds and the occasional shepherd boy.)

Later in the episode, two of Dany’s Dothraki footmen inform her that her dragons only ate only “18 goats and 11 sheep” for lunch, a sign that they are losing their appetite as a result of the move up north. Considering that Game of Thrones scribes D.B. Weiss and David Benioff love foreshadowing, we couldn’t help but wonder if the dragon’s dietary needs will play some key role in the upcoming Battle of Winterfell. To better understand the dragon hunger situation and how it could impact the impending war with the Night King, Eater got in touch with a bona fide expert on large reptiles and flying animals, and asked her a few questions about how these aerial beasts might act during the epic battle ahead.

“My inclination would be to say that they are strict carnivores, based on looking at their skull,” says Leslie Storer, a zoological manager at the Oakland Zoo. By inspecting photos of the Game of Thrones dragons she found online, Storer was able to determine that the dragons’ 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 notes. “There’s no grinding molars like we have as omnivores, and no grinding molars like herbivores would have, like cows.” Since vegetal matter is totally out of the question, Sansa probably doesn’t have to worry about the dragons depleting her winter pantry, unless it’s full of cured meat.

As a result of their all-meat diet, the dragons are probably well equipped to endure a grueling zombie battle where regular meal breaks are not guaranteed. “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 explains. “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.” If the dragons seem less hungry than usual, that might be because reptile metabolism slows down in colder weather. Carnivorous reptiles tend to eat other animals that they can fit inside their entire mouths, but sometimes they do team up to tear down bigger animals together — so potentially, if southern queen Cersei manages to get ahold of those elephants she was talking about, they could end up as dragon chow.

HBO/Game of Thrones

If Drogon and Rhaegal are forced to fly farther north to assist with some White Walker (and — sob — White Walker dragon) slaying beyond Winterfell, that extra distance could make them even hungrier, although according to Storer, their large wingspan might work in their favor in that scenario. “For animals that fly, basically if you have a nice wide wingspan and a smaller body mass, it’s easier to do a lot of gliding, which is very low energy,” she explains. “And a lot of birds have devised various ways of using air currents as well as updrafts and warm bubbles of air — using what air naturally does to minimize the energy expended.”

All of this information suggests that the Mother of Dragons actually doesn’t have too much to worry about her scaly babies’ diets so long as she can get her magnificent monsters to have a hearty meal before the big fight. But there is one potential scenario that the queen should keep in mind: The dragons might eat her soldiers as snacks.

“I would think that’s a possibility,” Storer says. “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.”

This might be bad news for Jon, who caught some jealous dragon stink-eye after locking lips with Daenerys in the season premiere, although as a Targaryen he’s probably safe from becoming a reptile canapé. But Sansa, a Northerner who refuses to bend the knee before the Mother of Dragons, might want to watch her back, or at least wear a flame-retardant cape during the Battle of Winterfell.