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Saving the ‘mermaids’ of mythology
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Once the docile dugongs or sea mermaids were considered divine and no one hurt the ungainly mammals. Then they were mercilessly hunted. Today they’re protected.
Every morning, Huang Yilong looks out at the sea, hoping to catch a glimpse of the endangered dugongs or “mermaids,” once abundant in his coastal hometown of Beihai in southern China.
The 85-year-old fisherman says he and fellow villagers had not seen the rare, docile mammals for many years off the coast of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Now they have only memories.
A conservation project is underway to save the dugongs from extinction.
Also called sea cows, dugongs were once common in the Shatian shallow sea in Beihai’s Hepu County, their habitat before the 1980s.
When a vertically swimming dugong feeds her calf, holding it with her flippers, it looks like a human mother nursing a baby.
Once, they were considered divine and no one killed them.
Dugongs live on sea grass and can grow as long as three meters and weigh as much as 500kg. They live in shallow, tropical waters throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Australia has the world’s largest population, estimated at 70,000 in 1991. Recent estimates are not available.
“When I was young, I always saw these mermaids coming toward shore to feed on sea grass,” Huang says.
But the proliferation of fish farms and pollution reduced numbers sharply. They were hunted in great numbers for years and still become entangled in nets and injured and killed in boat collisions.
The mammal has been listed as a species vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Most of Hepu’s villagers in their 40s or older say they saw the dugongs when they were young, and some even had close contact with them.
“Whenever the dugongs saw us swimming by the seaside, they would immediately bow and wave to us like human beings,” Huang says with nostalgia.
Pang Xianzhang, a 67-year-old villager, says the dugongs were once considered divine and locals never tried to harm them. But everything changed in 1958, when the country was going through the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and the people’s commune era.
Communes required fishermen to provide a large amount of fish during the light seasons and they began to catch the fat dugongs. The killing didn’t stop until 1962.
“In just five years, more than 200 dugongs were killed,” Huang recalls, adding that he was among the culprits who ate the dugong meat.
Massive killing led to a drastic decrease in the population, and the mermaids were scarcely scene. Human damage to the marine ecosystem also killed sea grass and made the situation worse.
Sea cows
Fishermen are sad the younger generation cannot see dugongs in the wild, only in aquariums, as specimens in exhibitions, pictures in books or in TV nature films.
To save the sea cows from extinction, the Chinese government has placed them in the first-class protection category. In 1992 the Hepu Dugong National Nature Reserve was established, covering 350 square kilometers. It’s the world’s only dugong sanctuary of its kind.
In 2008, a protection project was started in Guangxi, costing around 25 million yuan (US$4.2 million) and mostly funded by the central government. The completed project includes a scientific research center, a rescue center, watchtowers and patrol boats.
The Beihai government has also tightened supervision and tried to clear out illegal sea farms in the reserve.
In recent years, there have been increased sightings by fishermen of the docile animals, thanks to preservation, said Zhou Xiang, a staff member at the reserve.
“Fishermen are now aware of the importance of dugong protection,” he says, “and they report any sightings to us.”
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