HELLO WONDERFUL HUMANS and welcome for the almighty return of your Daily Fun Fact From Flora ,
I missed y"all a lot and I am VERY EXCITED to be bringing some funky science back into your inbox every day.
Today I am going to introduce you to a species that you might already know a bit about but I think that they are in MUCH NEED OF APPRECIATION.
No — this is not the love child of an elephant , a mermaid and a hoover. This is a dugong !
Sometimes known as sea cows alongside their evolutionary cousins the manatees, they are the only totally herbivorous marine mammals (apart from me of course). In fact they eat between 50kg and 80kg of seagrass EVERY DAY. They evolved about 50-60 million years ago when some animals that kind of looked like elephants ventured into the water and started living there. Cos you know — why not?
Their nostrils are on the top of their head (you can see them in the GIF above) and they can close them using some handy little valves. They have tail flukes and fins that actually look a lot like those of dolphins.
Isn’t that a sexy outline.
They also have between 57 and 60 vertebrae which is pretty nuts. We have 33. Pretty rubbish in comparison really. Also weirdly enough their ribs contain almost no bone marrow , making them some of the densest bones in the animal kingdom. This is thought to help them stay submerged under the water. Maybe that’s also why they can weight up to a ton. Dense bones — yeah suuuuuure Susan.
They can live up to the age of 73 and tend to live solitary lives even though they are social animals and will communicate using chirps, whistles and barks. They are especially dependent on social contact early in life and calves and mothers are almost in constant physical contact. Calves even reach out and touch their mothers with their flippers for reassurance.
Gestation takes about 13-15 months (oof) and usually to just one calf at a time. Newborns are already 1.2m long and are fed milk from their mothers for the first 14-18 months of their life. Weirdly enough their nipples are found in their armpits like this.
This is it in action (okay this is a manatee not a dugong but it was the best I could find I"m sorry). Looks kind of painful I can’t lie.
What is also incredible is that when they need to be nursed, calves have been seen to suck their flippers in the same way humans might suck their thumb.
ISN"T THAT SO CRAZY.
We need to be careful with our lovely dugongs though. Their very long lives and the fact that they reach sexual maturity at about 18 years old means their populations are very vulnerable. If even a small proportion of individuals are killed it will take a LONG ASS TIMEfor populations to recover. Also because they love to live in the shallow waters where their favourite seagrass is found they are at risk of boat strikes , getting trapped in fishing nets and getting bombarded by tourist boats with poor practices. This can chase them into deeper water and out of the safe shallow waters they love so dearly.
Where I was in the Red Sea, there are now only 32 of them left. And I was lucky enough to see one which was FRICKING NUTS.
Hope you enjoyed learning about them as much as I did.
Love to you,
Flora
