TO SEE A DUGONG is to want to hug a dugong, with its round body, gently curved flippers and gigantic smiling face. Along with their manatee cousins, these marine mammals have earned the nickname “sea cows” thanks to their grazing habits, consuming up to 85 pounds of seagrass a day.
Seagrass, in turn, depends on the sunlight that illuminates shallow coastal waters. In Australia, where a wide and well-lit continental shelf boasts plentiful seagrass, dugong populations can thrive. “Australia was probably always the dugong capital of the world,” says Helene Marsh, a leading dugong expert at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.
East Africa has a similarly wide continental shelf and may once have housed as many dugongs as Australia, but coastal development and pollution have destroyed seagrass beds. Mean-while,…