Sea Cows and Old Souls: Meeting Dugongs and Turtles Responsibly

The first sign is usually the sand. A pale plume drifting across the shallows of Marsa Mubarak, as though someone were ploughing the seabed. Then the shape behind it resolves: two, maybe three metres of grey, unhurried muscle, snout buried in the meadow, a remora hitching a lift on its flank. A dugong, doing the one thing dugongs really do. Eating.

They are the strangest animals on this coast, and the easiest to love. Sirenians — cousins of the manatee, closer kin to elephants than to anything with fins — with a whiskered face, a paddle tail, and an expression of permanent mild surprise. The story people tell is that homesick sailors mistook them for mermaids, which tells you mostly about the sailors. What matters here is simpler: dugongs eat seagrass, almost nothing but seagrass, and the sheltered bays north of Marsa Alam town — Marsa Mubarak and the Abu Dabbab area above all — hold some of the healthiest meadows on Egypt's Red Sea coast. Where the grass is, sooner or later, the grazers are.

The same meadows feed the coast's other celebrity: the green turtle. Big, barnacled females work the grass in the sandy bays, drift up for air, settle back down and carry on, as they have since long before the first resort generator hummed. A green takes decades just to reach breeding size, so a large one in front of you is old by definition. Divers call them old souls for a reason; watch one taking methodical bites out of a patch of meadow and you are looking at a rhythm older than any calendar.

How a sighting actually happens

Not on schedule, is the honest answer. Dugongs commute. An animal may graze one bay for days, then vanish down the coast for a week. Sightings travel by word of mouth — a phone call before the boats leave, a message from whoever was in the water first — and the bay that had a dugong at eight o'clock may have a flotilla by eleven. Green turtles are more dependable, because the grass doesn't move and neither, much, do they. But nobody serious will guarantee you a dugong, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

The good encounters are almost always the calm ones. You float. You keep your fins quiet and your distance honest. The animal surfaces, breathes, descends, resumes. If it wanted to leave, it could — dugongs are surprisingly quick when they choose to be — and the fact that it hasn't is the entire encounter. You are being tolerated by a wild animal in its dining room. That tolerance is what everybody comes for, and it is the first thing a crowd destroys.

What the crowd costs

A dugong puts away tens of kilos of wet grass a day, which means most of the daylight spent with its face in the meadow, coming up to breathe every few minutes. A ring of snorkellers interrupts both halves of that. Chase it and it burns energy it meant to spend feeding. Cut off its path upward and you have turned a breath into a stressful event. Repeat that daily, boat after boat, and animals abandon a bay altogether — not because any single swimmer meant harm, but because a boatload of well-meaning people is indistinguishable, from below, from a predator that will not go away.

Turtles suffer the same arithmetic plus a specific insult: being touched, grabbed, or posed with for photographs. Good operators stamp on it. It still happens.

So the rules, which are short:

• Keep your distance — several metres, more when the animal is feeding — and never position yourself between it and the surface.
• No chasing, no touching, no feeding. Ever. Feeding rewires wild behaviour, and handling a turtle strips the protective layer that covers its skin and shell.
• Limit your time. A few minutes of watching, then let it be. The animal does not get a lunch break because you flew a long way to be here.
• Choose operators who brief before the water, cap group sizes, and call swimmers back when the crowd builds. A guide who says "we may not see one, and here is how we behave if we do" is the one worth paying.

Much of this coast sits inside protected waters, where harassing marine wildlife is prohibited and the better dive centres police it themselves. But the better reason has always been the animal.

The meadow underneath

None of this exists without the grass. Seagrass is the least photographed habitat in the Red Sea and one of the most important: nursery for juvenile fish, anchor for the seabed, and a quietly formidable store of carbon. The meadows are why Marsa Mubarak and Abu Dabbab have dugongs at all — and they are damaged by dragged anchors, by feet trampling the shallows, and by the slow chemistry of coastal development.

Look down as you swim out. Those furrows in the grass, like tractor lines in a field, are dugong feeding trails — proof the animal was here before you and intends to come back. Whether it can is decided in small ways: where the anchor drops, how the group behaves, which boat you book. The mermaid myth was always backwards. The wonder is not that they look like us. It is that they were here first, farming the same field for generations, and with a little restraint they will still be at it long after we have dried off.