Name: Dugongs Survive Only Where Seagrass Thrives…
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T17:04:31.000Z
Duration: 17 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Shimmering between myth and mystery, mermaids have captured people's imaginations since the dawn of civilization.

Tales of half human, half fish beings echo across cultures and time.

Glamorous symbols of danger or salvation, mermaids are mirrors of human desire and fear.

Untouchable yet familiar, they embody the ocean's mysteries.

But are they figments of the imagination?

Or echoes of something forgotten beneath the waves?

In modern day Qatar, groundbreaking scientific discoveries could shed light on the origins of these legends, as they contribute to a better understanding of a shy, gentle creature rarely seen by humans.

To learn more about these elusive creatures, we start our journey in Australia, home to the largest surviving dugong population on the planet.

Helen Marsh is one of the world's leading experts in these underwater herbivores.

I've been studying dugongs for about 50 years.

Their closest terrestrial relative is an elephant, and

they look a bit like a cross between a walrus and a dolphin.

Some people would say that they had a face that only a mother could love.

But the calves in particular are really cute and quite affectionate animals.

The most amazing thing is that dugongs have fine hairs like cats, whiskers all over their body, which have nerves.

So for a dugong, the most important sense is the sense of touch, which enables it to detect water, currents and movement of other animals.

Now you can see it has to feed on the bottom because the mouth opens ventrally.

The whole head acts like a giant scrubbing brush to collect the seagrass.

They actually have pretty pathetic teeth, and so they need to eat soft and delicate plants.

Seagrass are pretty easy for them to dig up and they can eat the whole plant, which means they get the nutrition from both the leaves and from the roots and rhizomes.

Sea glass is very important to the environment because it's very important for lots and lots of species, not just dugongs.

Dugongs rely solely on seagrass for survival.

But as the only sea mammals who consume it in huge quantities, the meadows also depend on them.

Their grazing plows the seagrass beds and some of the seeds go through their digestive system, spreading as they move, helping to regenerate the meadows.

Dugongs are known to inhabit the 27 degrees north and south of the equator.

But currently the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red lists dugongs as vulnerable to extinction.

In some countries, they have already disappeared in others, they're believed to be in rapid decline.

Perhaps what makes dugongs most vulnerable is that they inhabit coastal environments where humans are also most active.

The reasons for their falling numbers are unsustainable fishing, collision with vessels, and

last, but by no means least, the large scale loss of seagrass, caused in part by climate change.

With it come increasingly frequent extreme weather events, all of which massively impact seagrass and therefore threaten the survival of the remaining dugong populations.

The team in Australia is working tirelessly to preserve the delicate ecosystems they rely on to survive.

Seagrass is so important to dugong, so protecting their seagrass habitat is very important.

We do a lot of work here to try and find solutions for their protection.

To understand population size of dugong numbers, the technique we've been using most frequently is aerial surveys.

That means surveying a whole stretch of coastline and counting animals.

We have conducted the aerial survey for jue bones for about 40 years.

This extensive research has helped scientists begin to understand more not only about dugongs, but

The presence of dugongs gives us an indication of the health of the ocean and most importantly, the health of our coastal environments and the seagrass meadows.

We estimate that a dugong requires about 30-50kg of seagrass per animal per day.

If you find dugongs in an area, that means seagrass is there and most likely healthy.

If you start seeing dugongs in decline or not seeing them in certain areas, that probably means that seagrass is either in poor condition or has disappeared.

But feeding grounds are only part of the puzzle.

understanding their movements and migration patterns is key to protecting their populations, a challenging task.

We also conduct a lot of tracking work to understand their diving behavior.

To tag dugongs, we have to capture them manually.

And that's a pretty intense activity that we conduct in the field.

We capture the animal, secure them against the stretcher, and

then it takes about 10 minutes to deploy, say, a satellite tag, take measurements, skin samples for DNA analysis, to then release the animal.

Now, once the animal is equipped with the tags, we get all of the information through satellites onto our computers to understand where dugongs might have been, what their preferred habitats are, and

how they're diving through the water column.

To be honest, I quite like the fact that there is a challenge to study dugongs.

They're not easy to get to, they're not easy to get close to.

That provides a bit of a challenge for US scientists.

The story of these out of reach creatures begins not in the oceans, but

on land, over 50 million years ago, in a world long forgotten, when their ancestors roamed the earth as terrestrial herbivores, a now extinct lineage that also gave rise to modern elephants.

Shifting coastlines and changing climates lured some of these mammals from land to water.

Over time, their amphibious ancestors began a gradual transition.

Flippers replaced legs, lungs evolved for long slow dives, and

the dugong emerged as the herbivorous aquatic mammal it is today.

Fossilized remains of these ancient mammals have been found in Qatar, dating back millions of years and demonstrating a long history of sea cows in the Arabian Peninsula, which continues to the present day, where scientists have made a remarkable discovery.

I was so lucky as a marine scientist to work in three basins.

The Mediterranean Sea and then in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the Gulf of Mexico, I used to work on the deep sea.

When I came here, I started to look at the life in the Arabian Gulf.

I imagined with extreme condition, extreme temperature, extreme salinity, it would be less diverse.

It was very surprising that we have these many ecosystems and this diversity.

Although seagrass is in decline in most places, despite exceptionally high temperatures and salinity, here in Qatar, it's flourishing and the dugong population is thriving.

Seagrass species we have here are tolerant for conditions that is very harsh.

So the species we have here is different from the species we have in different places.

Dr. Yusra Salay Men is a leading expert on seagrass.

Her research here could be the key to regenerating dugong feeding grounds elsewhere and countering the effects of climate change.

We expect salinity to increase, we expect temperature to increase.

These are two parameters of climate change.

So we actually work on modeling what we see here to be able to predict how the climate will affect other basins in the world.

Mohsen Al Ansi, a keen conservationist with a passion for the underexplored.

Having found where the dugongs are, the team began to study their unique behavior in the Gulf.

And the most pressing questions were, how many dugongs inhabit these waters and why do they come here?

The first time I heard of a dugong was from this project.

It came at a perfect time where I was looking for a topic and I loved it.

It was when Dr. Mahsen approached Dr. Yusra.

With the team now fully in place, the time had come to take a deep dive into the world of these elusive creatures.

They are shy mammals, especially the dugongs in our region.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Dugongs Survive Only Where Seagrass Thrives…

vulnerable

demonstrate

delicate

presence