A solitary figure stands on the shore of Thailand’s Tang Khen Bay. The tide is slowly rising over the expanse of sandy beach, but the man does not seem to notice. His eyes are not fixed on the sea, but on the small screen clutched between his hands.
About 600 metres offshore, past the shadowy fringe of coral reef, his drone hovers over the murky sea, focused on a whirling grey shape: Miracle, the local dugong, is back.
Theerasak Saksritawee, known by his nickname Pop, has been visiting Tang Khen Bay nearly every day for the past 15 months to monitor the dugongs, including Miracle, who have come to live in this pocket of the Andaman Sea.
After dropping his daughter off at school, Pop, 42, makes the short drive from his home in Phuket city down to a roti bread shack crouched on the bay’s shore. Sometimes he will travel farther – to the beaches of Koh Phra Thong or down to Trang province.
Here, he stakes out the bay for up to eight hours, guiding his drone over the water in search of dugongs.
The influencer racing to save Thailand’s most endangered sea mammal
“I see Miracle almost every day, although there have been times when I didn’t spot him for as long as a month,” says Pop, a hobbyist photographer who began filming the dugongs after seeing them on social media.
“I feel a deep connection to these incredible creatures,” he says. “Dugongs are a vital part of my home.”
I felt heartbroken because she was one of my favourite dugongs. The lady who makes the roti here cried‘Pop’ Saksritawee
At one point, there were as many as 13 dugongs living in Tang Khen Bay, nibbling the stubbly seagrass that sprouts along the ocean floor.
But today, Miracle is the only one left. The aggressive dugong chased the others away, Pop says, nipping at their paddle-shaped flippers to keep the precious seagrass to himself.
It is not known where the others have gone. The only companion that Miracle seemed to tolerate – a small female dugong named Jingjok – died last year.
“I felt disappointed and heartbroken because she was one of my favourite dugongs,” Pop recalls. “The lady who makes the roti here cried.”
Theerasak ‘Pop’ Saksritawee, an amateur conservationist, uses a drone to monitor the dugongs in the bay
Across the shallow coastal and island waters of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, dugongs (Dugong dugon) – medium-sized marine mammals similar to their sea cow relatives, manatees – are in trouble.
An August 2025 assessment by the convention on the conservation of migratory species of wild animals found that the dugong, already considered vulnerable to extinction, is also critically endangered in many parts of the world, threatened by habitat loss, climate breakdown, noise, boat strikes, and water and plastic pollution. The latter gained significant media attention in 2019 after a beloved baby dugong named Marium was found dead in Thailand with plastic in her stomach.
The dugongs living along Thailand’s Andaman Coast are now thought to be critical to the survival of the species. The region is one of only six locations in the world, outside Australia, with a population of more than 100 dugongs. In 2022, at least 273 dugongs lived in Thai waters, according to government estimates.
But a couple of years ago, dead or emaciated dugongs began washing up en masse along Thailand’s shores. From 2019 to 2022, an average of 20 dugong strandings a year were reported along the Andaman Coast. Then, from 2023 to 2024, that number more than doubled, to 42 a year. Jingjok’s death became just another statistic.
“We have probably easily lost half the population,” says Petch Manopawitr, an ecologist and adviser on dugongs to Thailand’s marine and coastal resources department.
Top: biologists examine a dead dugong at the Phuket Marine Biological Center. A major cause of dugong deaths is starvation. Below right: Pop takes a sample of contaminated seawater at Tang Khen Bay. It was found to be diesel spilled from a local boat. Left: the tail fluke of a dead dugong is measured
Much of the devastation occurred in nearby Trang province, south-east of Phuket. Once a stronghold for the dugongs thanks to its abundant seagrass meadows, locals say the animals are no longer seen in Trang.
Many have instead migrated about 60 miles (100km) to the waters off Phuket, a global tourism hotspot with expansive resorts that usher in millions of visitors every year. This, scientists say, poses additional challenges as the area is not used to the presence of dugongs and boat traffic needs to be intensively managed to protect the animals.
Everywhere we went, local people would tell us about a different cause. But whatever was happening had moved along the coastProf Helene Marsh
In January 2025, an international team of 13 scientists assembled for a fact-finding mission along the Andaman Coast to determine what was killing the country’s dugongs.
Helene Marsh, a global dugong authority and emeritus professor at Australia’s James Cook University, travelled along the coast for five days, inspecting the state of seagrass meadows and interviewing government scientists, conservation organisations and local people about what they were witnessing.
Marsh and her colleagues concluded that the dugongs were responding to a massive seagrass die-off. “Dugongs are seagrass community specialists,” she says. “An adult animal eats maybe 40 to 60kg a day.”
The most serious seagrass losses were in coastal waters near Trang, the group found, while seagrass in Krabi, Phuket and Phang Nga provinces remained in decent shape. Trang’s seagrass dieback therefore culminated in more dead dugongs washing ashore, starving animals becoming stranded, fewer young being born, and animals migrating to find greener pastures.
Top: scientists from Kyoto University prepare to monitor dugongs acoustically to see if playing sounds underwater can prevent dugongs being hit by boats; above right: government marine biologists test seawater contaminated with diesel; left, a fisheries biologist, Attawut Kantavong, checks climate-resilient seagrass at a lab in Sri Racha
But what is killing the seagrass is still unclear. The mission concluded in their report that the root causes were unknown, but said the die-off may have been caused by an accumulation of factors: less light reaching the seagrass due to silt in the water, more pollution and dissolved nutrients in the water, the effect of dredging, warmer seas and shifting tidal cycles leaving seagrass more exposed to the sun.
If you have a system that is already a little bit sick, this kind of thing can knock things off quite easilyPetch Manopawitr
“The Thai situation is quite puzzling in that it doesn’t seem to have been associated with an extreme weather event, and it could be a chronic condition,” says Marsh. “Everywhere we went, the local people would tell us about a different local cause. But it was pretty clear that, whatever was happening had moved along the coast.”
Some experts say it may simply be that higher water temperatures from human-caused climate change are pushing an already compromised ecosystem to a breaking point. “If you have a good, intact and healthy ecosystem, it can probably cope with such an extreme situation,” Manopawitr says. “But if you have a system that is already a little bit sick, this kind of thing can knock things off quite easily.”
At Tang Khen Bay, Pop stares across the bay at a new hotel going up. There have been heavy rains in recent weeks, spurring deadly floods in southern Thailand.
“The rain washes down materials from the construction site into the bay,” he says. Such wastewater and sediments deprive seagrass of essential nutrients, while algae blooms proliferate over the seagrass, blocking out sunlight. During one period of heavy rain, Pop recalls, Miracle left the bay for a week.
Manee Sanae, who runs the roti stall, says she used to see many dugongs popping up for air near the buoys. “There was also much more seagrass before, even near the boats that you see parked in front of my shop. But not any more.”
Marium, an orphaned baby rescued off a beach in Krabi in 2019. The calf was dubbed ‘Thailand’s sweetheart’ but was found dead four months later with plastic in her stomach. Photograph: Sirachai Arunrugstichai/AFP-Getty
While there have been some efforts by the government to plant new seagrass and provide additional food for the hungry dugongs, such interventions cannot reach the scale required to sustain dugongs in the long-run, Manopawitr says.
“This critical ecosystem is much more fragile than we have believed before,” he says. “We never really imagined we were going to lose such a vast area of seagrass – the last stronghold of seagrass in Thailand – in a very short period of time.”
Moving forward, he advocates for locally managed marine areas and adaptive measures in protected areas that can help to create an ocean corridor as the dugongs migrate in search of food. One glimmer of hope, he adds, is that the dugongs that moved into Krabi have begun to have calves.
Meanwhile, locals such as Pop and Sanae do what they can to help the species, with an online group now dedicated to protecting the bay’s dugongs.
If Sanae sees fishing boats enter Tang Khen when Miracle is present, she says she immediately informs the group chat so they can help to keep the fishermen away.
The people who visit her stall do not know much about dugongs, she adds. “But sometimes I tell them about Miracle.”
Theerasak Saksritawee and Thailand’s critically endangered dugongs form the subject of a 15-minute Guardian documentary: Payuun
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center
