My speech - SAVE THE DUGONG!!!!

Save the Dugong!!!!!

Did you know that there are only 17,500 Dugongs left in the world? They are becoming extinct!!! We need to SAVE THE DUGONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Right now, you might be wondering what a Dugong even is. If you keep your ears wide open, you will walk away knowing what the animal is, why they are highly endangered and how to save it.

The cutest underwater vacuum cleaner, the cheekiest chubbiest Manatee species, cousin of the Stellers sea cow, this is the Dugong. Now, what is a Dugong? Well, the Dugong is an underwater sea mammal. They can reach up to 900 kilograms and can become 4 meters long. They have a flat tail and flippers just like a Whale but are they are more related to an Elephant than a Whale. Adding to that, they have a large mouth with an upper lip used for bristling sea grass. They even eat a bit more than 18 kgs of seagrass each day! These highly endangered animals have very dense and heavy bones to keep them submerged. These innocent creatures live on their own, in pairs or in larger groups. As you can tell, these lovely animals aren’t dangerous but useful and charming instead so that is why we should SAVE THE DUGONG!!!!

Now that you know what a Dugong is, we should go and have a close look at why they are endangered. The numbers of Dugongs are becoming less because they are getting stuck in fishing nets but people aren’t letting them go. Tourists are swimming up to them and the Dugongs are getting scared away. These cute and lovely animals do have predators. The main ones are crocodiles, killer whales and tiger sharks. The problem with that is that Dugongs are not fast swimmers so they will most likely get caught. Another reason that Dugongs are highly endangered is that they only give birth to one child every 3-7 years. For all of these reasons, I feel that we should SAVE THE DUGONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that we know why they are endangered, we will take a look at how we can save these adorable animals. We need to stop tourists scaring them away while swimming up to them. In some of countries there are already laws to stop people being cruel to the Dugongs but we need to make the whole world have those laws. Being cruel means killing them for meat and skin. Plus, if we lose our special species the grass will grow so much that our oceans will get destroyed. If we lose the Dugong lots of other animals won’t be able to get around because the Dugong eats sea grass and they make paths for crabs and other animals to skuttle through. There are already companies working to save the dugong. They have websites and on those websites there are petitions that you need to sign. Go to Savethedugong.org and sign the petition. We need to work together with them to SAVE THE DUGONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I have told you what a Dugong is, why they are highly endangered and how we can save them I challenge you to think about how to save these innocent creatures. I urge you to sign the petition and go about telling other people to sign the petition to SAVE THE  DUGONG!!!!!