Dugong
The dugong ( Dugong dugon ) is a large marine Mammifère with the body tapered, alive on the littorals of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean western. It constitutes, with the three species of Lamantin S, the order of the Siréniens.
This animal would be at the origin of the myth of the sirens.
Morphology
This mammal, characterized by a tooth lengthened in front of the face, measures 3 to 4 meters and can reach 900 kg.
Social life
The animal only lives or in small groups.
Food
These animals are Herbivore S, and graze the vegetation being on the not very major funds and generally very close to the coasts where they live. An adult needs forty kilograms food each day.
Threats and protection
More still than the Manatee, which belongs to the same order of the siréniens, this species is threatened. It is frequently wounded by the propellers of the engine boats and sometimes driven out for its meat. Its coastal habitats are in reduction, in particular because of the Tourisme, of the Pollution and the Urbanisation of the coast S.The rate of reproduction is low - small all four or five years - and late sexual maturity: around 10 years.
The world populations are in fast fall.
" One does not know in an extremely precise way the global population of the dugongs, but some countries have reliable figures: there would remain about it approximately 70.000 in the North of the Australia and 6000 in the Persian Gulf, the two only areas of the world, with saying specialists, where the species has true medium-term chances of survival. Elsewhere, they amount only to small residual populations, a hundred with the Mozambique, around fifty with the Kenya for example, a few tens in Malaysia (these figures are dubious). He is regarded today as the marine mammal more threatened, and in many countries, like the Maldives or the Mauritius, the dugong is already nothing any more but one to remember. "
The animal is officially completely protected, and placed in appendix 1 of the QUOTE.
The dugong was not always the only representative of its family. There also was another species of dugongidés, but she unfortunately disappeared at the 18th century, exterminated by the man a few years after her discovery: Hydrodamalis gigas or Rhytine de Steller, which measured approximately 7 to 8 meters length.
External bonds
- Dugong Photo Gallery (in. /it.)
- Ph2otos.com - Dugong in Egypt
References
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