Dugong

Names & Nicknames: Dugong, sea cow

Size: Dugongs usually grow to around 2 to 3.5 metres in length, 225 to 425kg in weight, and the ladies tend to be beefier. The largest lovely lady was a whopping 4 meters long and over 1,000kg in weight - that’s like a small car!

Smell: Want to know what a dugong fart smells like? Course you do. Researchers have replicated it by mixing a foul-smelling chemical called skatole with a concentrated oyster scent – you get some idea of eau de dugong!

Communication: Despite preferring to float around on their own most of the time, dugongs can get quite chatty. They communicate through different sounds, like chirps, twills, barks, squalls, and quacks!

Favourite Hangout: Dugongs like nice, calm, warm, coastal waters – preferably in sheltered areas like bays, estuaries and lagoons, as long as there's lots of tasty seagrass.

Favourite Snack: They (alongside their manatee cousins) aren't called sea cows for nothing! Their absolute favourite snack is seagrass; they can munch through 40kg of the stuff a day.

Eating Habits: Dugongs are big advocates of Movember, using an impressive array of sensitive bristles on their upper lips to feel out seagrass. They'll also use their powerful upper lips to snaffle the entire seagrass plant.

Toilet Humour: A creature that can eat up to 40kg of seagrass a day can also produce a lot of… gas. And just like with land cows, this emerges as a whole lot of burps and farts - charming.

Love Language: Despite their shy nature, dugongs can be feisty when they want to be. Dugong courtship can be very competitive, with multiple males following a single female. Things can get heated, causing these males to fight with a series of body lunges and tail splashes. If a male manages to ward off the competition, he'll mount the female from below. He has to be careful, though, as the other males may still be trying to knock him off his perch.

If you see them: Dugongs are pretty shy and prefer to keep to themselves. So if you see them, try to keep your distance, especially if you're on a boat! Being hit by boats is a major threat to dugongs given their slow-moving nature and the fact they like to chill just below the water's surface.

Red Flags: If we've learned anything from this species spotlight, it's that dugongs loooove seagrass. So when their seagrass meadow habitats are threatened by coastal developments and water pollution, well, that can spell disaster.

Epic Journeys: All that seagrass out there isn't going to eat itself, so dugongs travel far and wide, potentially over 1,000 kilometres across the open ocean to find more food and warmer waters.

Glow-up: Dugong mothers usually give birth to just a single calf underwater after a gestation period of over a year! A mother's work isn't finished there; she'll continue to care for and feed the calf on milk for another 18 months or more. During this time, the calf will stay close to its mother and often ride on her back – adorable. Even when the calf has moved on from milk, they may stay with their mother for up to 7 years.

Facts: Despite their gentle nature and love of seagrass, Dugongs may actually be brutal predators. Okay, they're not quite as ruthless as say, a Chinese giant salamander, but recent research has shown that alongside seagrass, they also sometimes hoover up ascidians (also known as sea squirts) as well as some other invertebrates (animals with no backbones) like some mussels and worms.

Who are they in the friendship group: Very happy to just float through life feasting on their favourite snacks on the way.