Mermaid-Like Dugong Is on Its Way Back

Environmentalists depressed about rain forest destruction and ozone depletion can turn to northern Australia for solace.

“Mermaids” are thriving in the warm waters off the Great Barrier Reef.

Twenty years ago scientists feared the dugong, a saltwater mammal whose shyness and size gave rise to the mermaid legends, was so rare it was heading the way of the dodo.

But Helene Marsh, the world’s leading expert on the vegetarian dugong, says research off the reef and in the Persian Gulf in the Middle East shows the dugong is in fact flourishing. It just prefers to keep out of people’s way.

“They were considered an endangered species because they are very hard to see when they’re alive and exceptionally conspicuous when they’re dead,” Marsh said.

“But when we started doing aerial surveys we found they were everywhere we looked in shallow, sheltered waters. There are heaps more than anyone ever thought--probably around 80,000 in Australian waters alone,” she said.

Ten feet long, the dugong, also known as a sea cow, grazes on sea grass in tropical waters from East Africa to the South Pacific state of Vanuatu.

The dugong actually bears little resemblance to the popular image of a mermaid. The snub-nosed creature has a whale’s tail, hide and blubber, which attracted hunters and apparently confused lonely seafarers of bygone days.

Marsh, an associate professor of zoology at James Cook University in Townsville, says virtually nothing was known about the dugong in the 1960s, when shark nets brought them to the attention of Australian scientists.

The nets were installed off popular bathing beaches in Townsville in 1964. In the first year 84 dugongs were caught in them and drowned.

An American biologist at the university, George Heinsihn, established a carcass salvage operation to study the animal and eventually persuaded the town to reduce the netting.

International wildlife officials placed the dugong on the endangered list in the late 1960s because of its invisibility and the fact its nearest relative, the giant Steller Sea Cow, had been wiped out by hunting off the Aleutian Islands.

Australia outlawed dugong hunting, except by Aborigines, in the 1960s.

Wildlife organizations became extremely concerned about the status of the species in the mid-1980s, when a giant oil spill occurred in the Persian Gulf, a major dugong area.

“About 30 dugongs were washed up on the coast of Saudi Arabia and, as we thought there were only around 50 in the whole gulf, we thought they must have been wiped out,” Marsh said.

Saudi Arabian authorities proposed to repopulate the gulf with imported dugongs and asked one of Marsh’s colleagues, Tony Preen, to help them with their plan.

To everyone’s amazement, Preen’s aerial surveys of the gulf indicated that it contained 7,000 dugongs.

Aerial surveys off Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia also showed large numbers of dugongs and vast undiscovered areas of sea grass, many of which are now officially protected breeding grounds.

“They tend to live in muddy water and they’re really discreet animals,” Marsh said in an interview. “They come to the surface every couple of minutes but are very wary of humans.”

Pointing to the shallows off Townsville, Marsh said: “There are about 600 out there, about the same as in Moreton Bay off Brisbane. But University of Queensland researchers had never seen one in Moreton Bay in 25 years’ work.”

The dugong lives for about 70 years, but a female only has a single calf every three to five years, is pregnant for a year and suckles the calf for about 18 months.

“The bottom line is that even with very low natural mortality the population will only increase at around 5% a year,” Marsh said.