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 FULL CIRCLE DIGITAL MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2013 BUSINESS SUBSCRIPTION FOR A FREE DIRECTORY February 2014 11