‘Gentle giant’ spotted stopping for a snack off coast of India. Watch ‘rare sighting’
In the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the seafloor is sandy and covered with short sea grasses.
The tropical archipelago, a territory of India just south of Myanmar, is a tropical oasis and a necessary stopping point for creatures hoping to cross the Bay of Bengal.
At the end of January, when researchers with the Wildlife Institute of India were diving off the coast, they noticed a plume of sand moving toward them in the water, according to a Jan. 24 post on X.
Then from the blooming sediment came a set of giant lips, followed by a large, round and gray body.
“A rare sighting of (a) dugong, gentle giants of the seagrass ecosystem, pins hopes of population recovery in the Andaman Islands,” researchers said in the post that accompanied a video.
The Wildlife Institute of India has been working on a Dugong Recovery Program since 2016, hoping to bring the fewer than 200 living dugongs in the Indian Ocean into a wider geographic range, India news outlet Mid-Day reports.
“The sighting of (the) dugong was a result of efforts we have been putting into creating this citizen science network across the islands, including different sea-faring stakeholders,” project scientist Swapnali Gole told the outlet. “SCUBA divers are one of our key stakeholders as they had been reporting regular dugong sightings to us from this place where we sighted the dugong and it was only after that we planned to go for a dive. Our work on dugong conservation in the island is a product of multiple stakeholders pitching in because (a) sighting is so rare.”
Dugongs, a member of the same animal order as three species of manatees, are a vulnerable species, most commonly found throughout Indonesia and Malaysia and along the northern coast of Australia, according to the IUCN Red List.
Unlike their manatee cousins, they never go into fresh water, so are considered the only completely herbivorous marine mammal, according to Oceana.
Dugongs and manatees are easy to tell apart because of the shape of their tails. While manatees have a large, rounded and almost spoon-like tail, the tail of a dugong is fluked, looking more like the tail of a whale, according to the Marine Mammal Center.
The Andaman Islands are on the eastern edge of the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean.
This story was originally published February 3, 2025 at 4:53 PM with the headline "‘Gentle giant’ spotted stopping for a snack off coast of India. Watch ‘rare sighting’."
