322 THE INDO-PACIFIC AND ITS SHORES 



have everywhere become more or less scarce. Dugongs are sluggish, harmless 

 animals, never ascending rivers to any considerable distance, but frequenting still, 

 shallow bays and estuaries, where they browse on marine vegetation, especially a green 

 alga and a certain phanerogamous plant. Their method of feeding is not the 

 same as in manatis, which pluck the plants they eat by means of the two fleshy 

 lobes above the upper jaw-pad, and push their food towards the mouth with the 

 flippers. Similar lobes certainly exist in the dugong, but these do not appear in 

 fresh specimens to be capable of any great degree of separation or movement, 

 while the flippers are hardly long enough to give any assistance in feeding. On 

 the other hand, as the upper jaw-pad, or upper lip, itself is evidently freely 

 movable, and possibly to some extent extensile, it seems possible that it is used in 

 plucking seaweed, which certainly could be grasped between the pad and the 

 lower jaw. In India and Ceylon the fishermen report that a single young one 

 may be seen with a female at any time of the year ; but on no occasion have they 

 observed a female nursing its offspring with one of her flippers, while her head 

 and fore-part of her body are raised out of the water after the fashion supposed 

 to have given origin to the mermaid-myth. Nevertheless it is generally believed 

 that the dugong, and not the manati, has given rise to this old legend. 



In Australia, dugongs now stand in imminent danger of extermination owing 

 to the relentless pursuit of the females, which yield more oil than the males; For 

 some time this was largely used in place of cod-liver oil for lung and nerve 

 troubles, but it has recently fallen somewhat into disfavour, owing to adulteration 

 with shark-oil. One of the native methods of killino- ducmnss is to erect a staging: 

 near the mud-flats to which these animals resort to browse on seaweed. On this 

 stage two or three men, armed with a coil of rope and harpoon, take up their 

 station on a moonlight night ; the harpoon consisting of a long pole with a hollow 

 at one end, into which is fitted a wooden head, attached to the side of the pole by 

 a grass-rope. Directly a dugong appears, it is struck with the harpoon, when 

 it immediately rushes off; but the pole attached to the harpoon-head by the rope 

 greatly retards its progress, and enables the natives, who at once take to a canoe, 

 to come up and dispatch the victim when it is exhausted. Another method is to 

 spear the dugongs from a canoe in the daytime as they are making their way to 

 their feeding-grounds ; the weapon employed in this case being a light spear tipped 

 with a piece of sharpened fencing-wire. The wire bends in the gutta-percha-like 

 hide, and the shaft so hampers the movements of the animal that it is easily caught 

 up by the canoe. The wound inflicted is, however, not mortal, and as the natives 

 do not appear to have any more efficient weapon, they resort to the expedient of 

 drowning the unfortunate creature. Europeans adopt a third method. An 

 enormous wide-meshed net, over a mile in length, is set when the tide is out along 

 the outside of the mud-banks where the sea-grass grows, and supported by stout 

 stakes. As the dugongs come in to feed on the flood-tide, they pass over the top 

 of the net, but when about to return with the ebb find their path barred. 

 Swimming up and down the inner line of the net, the dugongs (often, it may be, 

 but one) become thoroughly frightened, and at length, in desperation, drive their 

 heads through the meshes of the net, when their fate is sealed, as they become 

 inextricably entangled in it, and are finally drowned. 



