242 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [| November, 1905. 
see near the shore are those which have been wounded or are sick. 
I was unable to discover the depth at which those taken for the 
market are usually captured; but a gentleman who has visited 
the Dugong “ fisheries” off the northern coast of Queensland, tells 
me that in Australian waters the usual depth is from the ten 
to twelve fathoms. In the Gulf of Manaar stout nets, very deep, 
with a large mesh and heavily weighted, are sunk in the neigh- 
bourhood of the animal’s known feeding-places, and individuals 
of both sexes, but apparently more especially young ones, become 
entangled in them and are thus taken. Occasionally specimens 
are even captured in the ordinary drift nets used in catching fish. 
I was told that as many as sixty were sometimes brought into 
Kilakarai, a large native port near the northern corner of the Gulf 
on the Indian shore, in a year; but this number is probably 
exaggerated. The Muhammadans of the district are so fond of 
the flesh! that they give large prices for it, and probably the 
fishermen who possess the right kind of nets go in pursuit of the 
Dugong as often as they have nothing else to do; for the search is 
precarious, but the profits considerable should it be successful. 
As regards the food of the Dugong, it has often been stated, but 
not by Blanford, that it feeds exclusively on a marine phaneroga- 
mous plant. This is evidently not the case, as the stomach of my 
specimen was full of pieces of a green alga, all of which belonged to 
one species. Two things struck me about the contents of the stomach 
and the upper part of the intestines: (1) their freedom from all 
adventitious growths, either animal or vegetable, and (2) their 
perfect and unbruised condition. They consisted of clean pieces of 
seaweed about 25 inches long, plucked off and evidently not 
masticated. Hven the little bladders which the seaweed bore 
had not burst. As regards the method of feeding, I do not think 
that it can be the same as that of the Manatees, which pluck the 
plants which they eat by means of the two lobes above the “ upper 
jaw pad,’ and push their food towards the mouth with their 
flippers. Similar lobes certainly exist in the case of the Dugong, 
but they did not appear in the fresh specimen to be capable of 
any great degree of separation or movement, while the flippers 
are hardly long enough to give any great assistance in feeding. 
As the ‘‘upper jaw pad” (upper lip) itself, on the other hand, was 
evidently freely moveable and possibly to some extent extensile, it 
seems possible that it is used in plucking seaweed, which certainly 
could be grasped between it and the lower jaw. This would 
necessitate the food being passed under the horny pad, with its 
bundles of more or less consolidated hairs, on the anterior part of 
the palate. Possibly these hairs may have the function, as they 
1 The meat is excellent ; roasted, I could not have distinguished it from 
good, but rather tough beefsteak. It had none of the peculiar flavour of 
whale-meat. Moreover, it has the same quality as that assigned, both by the 
old voyagers and by modern observers, to the flesh of the American Manatees 
—it keeps good for a considerable time, for at least three days in hot 
weather, during which mutton goes bad in twenty-four hours. The blubber is 
not made into oil at Kilakarai. 
