It was through this seagrass work that Indonesia's state-owned port operator company PELINDO, in 2025, asked Pak Andi to expand his research and take on something new: a research project on dugongs. The two, he says, could not really be separated. ‘’Sea grass and dugongs are related. So then they asked us to do research on dugong too.’’

Dugongs are large herbivorous aquatic mammals, close relatives of the manatee, and among the very few animals that rely completely on seagrass meadows as their primary food source and vital coastal habitat. In Bintan, Malay communities have historically eaten dugong meat, once served at weddings and other ceremonial occasions, and described to Pak Andi as tasting like beef, only better. This practice is now prohibited under Indonesian law: a Ministry of Marine Affairs regulation dating back to 1999 and updated in 2024 bans the catching and killing of dugongs. Fishermen also report accidentally catching dugongs as by-catch, though how often this happens, and how often it is truly accidental, remains unclear. Combined with a slow reproductive rate, producing only a single calf at a time, these pressures have pushed dugong populations into decline worldwide, making them an endangered species and, as Pak Andi notes, currently a hot topic across Indonesia.

Not all seagrass is equally attractive to dugongs. Around Pengudang, in the north of Bintan, the meadows are dominated by smaller, more delicate species such as Halophila and Halodule, precisely the kind dugongs prefer to graze on. Further east, in areas like Teluk Bakau and Kawal, seagrass meadows are wider and more diverse, but dominated by larger species such as Enhalus and Thalassia, which dugongs largely avoid. It is little surprise, then, that Pengudang has become the area where dugongs are most consistently sighted around Bintan.

The Orang Suku Laut, the sea nomads of the region, hold a longer and more intimate relationship with dugongs than most. Under an agreement with the government, they no longer hunt dugongs, though they have negotiated to continue catching certain other species, such as the green sea turtle, used for traditional medicinal purposes. Whether dugong hunting still happens quietly is difficult to say; a dugong was found dead near Sumpat Island in December 2025, reportedly caught as by-catch, though Pak Andi suspects it was eaten. When his team visited Panglong to learn about traditional dugong-hunting methods, they found the practice essentially gone: younger generations, now living on land, had lost the knowledge entirely. Only the oldest in the community still spoke of it. One elder recalling that the true Orang Suku Laut once knew how to ‘’call peace’’ to the dugongs, in order to approach the rather shy animals, a skill even he no longer possessed.

At its core, the Dugong Project is about closing a large gap in knowledge: nobody yet knows how many dugongs live in the waters around Bintan, nor how they move, though Pak Andi suspects they may share migratory patterns with dugongs seen in Singapore. To start gathering this data, the project trained a network of 20 to 25 local ‘’dugong rangers’’ from Berakit, Pengudang and nearby communities, formally recognised through local government decree, who report sightings and strandings through a dedicated Dugong Information Centre website.

Click HERE to go to the Dugong Project website.

Click HERE to find the accompanying Dugong App, which is an online conservation dashboard for tracking dugong sightings around Bintan.

So far, the website and app have proven simple enough for the rangers to use confidently, and the project counts figures like local champion pak Iwan Winarto, well known and connected in Pengudang, among its key partners. ‘’The main purpose is data, good quality data,’’ Pak Andi says, so that population and movement patterns can finally be understood, and so that dugong rangers can, in the meantime, help teach their communities not to catch, or eat, the animals they are learning to protect.