Hey there! Near the beginning of this year, we read this book called “Squirm.” I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t tell you! But somewhere in the book, endangered animals take a huge part. Everybody in my language arts class had to write a book about an endangered animal from their perspective. I chose a dugong because of how funny it looks, but it is a really cool animal. I wrote about an average day that happens to some dugongs out there. I also wrote about how you can help the dugongs survive in this world for way longer. I will put the book down here. I hope you like it!
I wake up from my long sleep. A good one, too. I look beside me. There are many fish, and I see my mom. We BOTH are thinking the same thing. We are hungry. The fish follow us everywhere we go because the small organisms that they eat follow us out of nearby seabeds. I swim around in the warm, blue waters of the Indo-Pacific with my mom, hungry and scavenging for food. We are looking for our favorite food, seagrass, which we rely on almost entirely. It’s very hard to find seagrass because it is endangered and has declined by 30% over the last 100 years. We swim very slowly in the foggy waters, famished. My stomach grumbles so loud, it shakes the entire ocean floor.
“What’s that over there?” I think to myself. That’s seagrass! I swim to the seagrass with my mom as fast as I can (which is not fast at all), and finally reach it. We both notice all of the fish around us and a strange humming noise. When I look up, I see a huge fishing boat coming in our direction! The boat lowers its fishing net into the water and catches many fish. The net is so big, it keeps filling up and is coming towards us! I try to swim away with my mom, and my mom gets caught in the net! “Mom!” I yell at her. “I’m coming!” “It’s okay, honey! Don’t worry about me. Swim away! Swim as fast as you can! Before it gets you!”
I swim away as fast as I can, past trash and pollution across the sea, worried that the net might get me. The waves feel like they are pushing me back towards the net. As I turn around, expecting to see my mom escape. She’s not there. Gone. And so are the fish. All I can see is the bellowing boat driving away. My heart drops as I swim back, trying to find her. My face goes pale. What. Just. Happened? The entire area goes silent, like a vacuum sucked up all of the sounds, and all of the life with it. Now it is just me, and the shallow waters of the ocean. I sink down to the ocean floor like a leaf falling in the wind. When I make it down there, I rub myself on the sand as a way of self-care.
My name is Dug the Dugong! My scientific name for my species is Dugong Dugon. What you just witnessed is a serious threat to my species and could make us go extinct very soon. We are vulnerable on the extinction scale, and our population has declined by 20% over the last 90 years. Bycatch is responsible for 85% of dugong deaths right now in Abu Dhabi. Bycatch is when a big fishing boat tries to catch a big school of fish with its big fishing nets and accidentally catches an animal it didn’t mean to catch. (Like what happened to my mom.) Bycatch is a very impactful thing for many sea animals like me! Another big threat to our species is poor water quality. Seagrass can’t catch as many rays of sunlight as it used to. Climate change is also a major factor in its decline. Because of how slow dugongs are, we were killed for hundreds of years in the past, because of the easy resources of meat and oil. Yeah, you heard me right. We have oil located in our blubber and the liver. All the meat we have produced has been used to make a bunch of food for humans, and the oil has been used for fuel and medicine. Without dugongs, there would be many overgrown seagrass meadows, which would look ugly and would be unhealthy for the fish. Fish and turtles use seagrass beds as nurseries because of the housing, protection from predators, and easy access to food. But with overgrown seagrass, that would make the seagrass way more unhealthy and dangerous for the turtles and fish.
To help save us from dying, people like YOU can help preserve seagrass beds in the shallower waters where we dugongs live and swim. You can do this by helping remove all natural fertilizers from the seagrass beds to prevent algae from growing there. You can also help by setting slower speeds for boats in shallower waters to make sure we don’t get hit. Dugongs are really defenseless, due to how slow they are and how they don’t have any special getaway tactics, like how squids can shoot ink, so dugongs can’t swim away from speeding boats about to hit them. You can also create marine-safe areas to reduce bycatch. You can tell if it is a marine protected area by watching out for signs, buoys, markers, and on a map/app.
The main people helping make these changes to save us are the “Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project.” They are doing all of the things I mentioned before to help save my population! Thanks to them, they have used $5.88 MILLION dollars to help save us! They are using this money to help strategically make new marine safe areas AND slow zones to protect us. They are also funding national projects in many different countries. People can also make campaigns to help convince people to save us! You can help convince them by telling them what the world would look like if we didn’t exist, how ugly it would be, and how unhealthy it would be for the fish.
In conclusion, we dugongs are very vulnerable animals. We can only reach about 14 miles an hour, at our max. As I said before, we don’t have any way to protect ourselves other than trying to swim away at 14 miles per hour. We have a bunch of meat and oil in us, so we got hunted in the past. Even though killing dugongs is illegal, we are still being killed in many ways. Seagrass’s population is also going down. People are saving seagrass AND dugongs by reducing pollution. Fish and turtles use seagrass to eat and sleep in, so if the seagrass has diseases in them, the fish and turtles will get sick, too. Thank you ALL for reading my call for help!!! Again, my name is Dug the Dugong, and goodnight!
