Full Circle Digital Magazine February 2014 | Page 11

MARINE • DUGONE

S

ailors of old were sure that mermaids existed. They told tales of
beautiful sirens, long tresses trailing, singing unearthly songs,
sometimes nursing babies. So convincing were these stories
that the first dugong specimens studied were classified in the group
Sirenia, named after the old legends.
It’s a bit of a stretch to think of a dugong as a mermaid. True, they
nurse their young, nestling them under their fore-flippers. Being wholly
marine, they have no hind limbs, only a graceful fluked tail like a dolphin’s.
But their singing consists of a variety of squeaks and squeals, their hair
is sparse and bristly, and their figures are hardly sylph-like.
Dugongs, or sea cows, are herbivores. They hoover up the leaves,
roots and rhizomes of seagrasses, narrowing their small eyes against
the cloud of mud that billows up around them. They are slow-moving,
gentle creatures, living close inshore in the tropical shallows where
their food grows. They breed slowly (gestation is 12 to 14 months and
the calving interval between two-and-a-half and seven years) and are
the most threatened of all marine mammals. Already hunted by sharks,
killer-whales and crocodiles, dugongs are also hunted by humans, and
die in boat-collisions or as by-catch in nets. Industrial run-off churns
up the sea meadows and kills the seagrasses on which the dugongs
graze. All of which chase dugongs towards becoming animals of
legend ... rather like mermaids.
Today, seeing a dugong is a rare and precious sight.

Sensitive bristles on the dugong’s hooverlike rotral
disc aid in detecting the roots they relish

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