ANTIQUE – A three-meter female dugong weighing around 200 kilos was washed ashore in Barangay Boroc-boroc, Belison town on Wednesday, Oct. 19.
Dugongs are marine mammal. Commonly known as “sea cows”, they graze peacefully on sea grasses in shallow coastal waters of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.
According to Rocelia Campos, Development Management Officer II of the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources (PENRO)-Antique, they will conduct a necropsy to determine the cause of the mammal’s death.
Campos said they also got some DNA samples from the dugong.
She added that the dugong’s mammary gland was extracting milk, thus there was a possibility that it had a calf or young dugong.
PENRO-Antique asked the Barangay Boroc-boroc officials to inform the nearby barangays about the possibility of finding the calf of the dead dugong.
Campos said the dugong will be brought to either the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (Seafdec) in Tigbauan, Iloilo or National Museum Region 6 in Iloilo City, to be preserved. Dugongs graze on underwater grasses day and night, rooting for them with their bristled, sensitive snouts and chomping them with their rough lips.
These mammals can stay underwater for six minutes before surfacing. They sometimes breathe by “standing” on their tail with their heads above water.
Dugongs spend much of their time alone or in pairs, though they are sometimes seen gathered in large herds of a hundred animals.
Dugong is a critically endangered species that was the first marine mammal to be protected in the Philippines through Administrative Order No. 55 issued by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in 1991, which prohibited hunting dugongs. (With a report from Antique PIO Francisco)/PN
