In Busuanga, every morning during peak season, fishing boats refitted for tourists leave the docks for Black Island, where the near-certainty of a sighting has become the basis of a local economy.
“At the Dugong Park in Calauit, we have close to a 100% sighting rate,” said Dirk Fahrenbach, who runs a dugong-watching operation in the area. Days without a sighting, he said, are rare and usually come down to poor underwater visibility rather than the animals’ absence.
The enterprise draws 60 to 70 visitors a day during peak season, according to Rey Ramilo, executive director of C3 Philippines, enough to make it Busuanga’s leading tourist attraction.
The two dugongs most closely associated with the site have become familiar enough to earn names. Aban, a male dugong, was first observed as a juvenile and has since matured into what researchers who study him describe, half-jokingly, as an individualistic character. Aban is unafraid, a little lazy, occasionally adventurous, and now old enough to be searching for a mate. Pingas, easily identified by a mark on the tail, is often seen nearby.
“Ang dugong, individualistic din ang character nila, parang tao din,” Ramilo said.
What began as informal sightings has since developed into an organized enterprise. The community organization that manages dugong watching in the area has become a cooperative. Fahrenbach asserts that the arrangement produces conservation as a byproduct of commerce. Tourism, he said, is “always good” for protecting fish populations, coral reefs, and dugongs because the presence of tourists discourages illegal fishers from operating nearby.
He also pointed to a role for the private sector beyond tourism revenue. Dive operators and other tourism establishments participate in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, giving them a formal role in marine law enforcement.
It would seem that the dugong is not just surviving, at least in Busuanga. It is, in its way, employed. Still, none of this means the population is secure or even fully known. Even C3’s longstanding presence in the area has not produced a definitive count.
“Matagal na rin kami sa Busuanga pero hindi pa rin kami makapagsabi ng talagang we know the number of individuals,” Ramilo said. Despite years of work in the municipality, the organization still cannot say with confidence how many dugongs live there.
Calauit functions as what Ramilo describes as a “proxy site,” a relatively undisturbed island ecosystem. During a 2019 monitoring survey conducted with the community, C3 established a rough range of nine to 33 individuals present in the ecosystem. The near-certainty that tourists experience at Calauit does not hold everywhere along the coast. In nearby, less-monitored waters, Fahrenbach said, dugongs are shyer and sighting rates fall below 50%.
Roxas, before and after
Roughly 100 kilometers to the southeast, in the coastal barangays of Roxas municipality, a version of that same story once seemed to be forming, until it stopped.
Before Typhoon Odette tore through northern Palawan in December 2021, Barangay Captain Ariel Zambales recalled how his community worked directly with C3 Philippines to conduct seagrass research, much like the surveys that would eventually anchor Busuanga’s tourism economy.
“Kasama namin yung team ng C3 Philippines, parang mga astronaut kami,” he said, describing how they surveyed and measured nine of the roughly dozen or more seagrass species that researchers had identified in the barangay’s waters. The seagrass was so dense that it fouled boat propellers along established routes, he recalled.
Then Typhoon Odette came, barreling through Roxas like a bull on a rampage. “Puro seagrass talaga yung area na yan bago dumating yung Odette. Talagang washed out lahat,” he said. The C3 partnership that had documented the seagrass has not resumed. Since then, natural recovery has been slow and uneven, according to Zambales.
Zambales observed that seagrass began returning roughly two years later, coinciding with a pair of mother-and-calf sightings reported by residents in 2024. But another strong typhoon, Typhoon Tino, stripped much of it away again.
Unlike Busuanga, Roxas has no enterprise built around the dugong. What it has instead is a pattern that repeats with grim regularity in local news reports. A Palawan News archive of dugong coverage compiled for this series shows that four of six confirmed or suspected dugong deaths reported between 2021 and 2026 occurred in Roxas, with three recorded in 2025 alone. A dugong was found dead with signs of deliberate harm in Barangay Caramay in August. A second, whose cause of death was unclear, was found on a sandbar off Johnson Island barely two months later.
In each case, the local response has followed the same pattern, but there is no monitoring framework in place to prevent the next death.
The Last Mermaids: Palawan’s Vanishing Dugong Population (Part 1)
In Barangay Malcampo, Captain Richmon Saklet Dagumboy has overseen the barangay’s Marine Protected Area since 2013. Patrols are conducted largely using borrowed fishing boats after the barangay’s own patrol vessel was damaged in successive storms and never fully repaired. Fuel and maintenance are paid for out of the barangay’s small internal revenue allotment.
In 12 years, he estimated that the barangay has received only one or two training sessions specifically about dugongs and no dugong-specific support from the national government, despite submitting funding proposals.
“Sa ngayon po talaga ay wala pa kaming natatanggap na tulong na galing sa national,” he said. The barangay, he added, holds no data on the local dugong population.
Zambales described a parallel, informal system in which the community tracks fisherfolk permits and fishing gear, while the Department of Agriculture flies monitoring drones roughly once a month to track dugong sightings across Barangay 1 and neighboring barangays such as Kabugan, Johnson, and Rizal.
But drone footage and permit records do not amount to enforcement. When a dugong is illegally caught, evidence is usually insufficient to take action.
“Kapag hindi nahuhuli, wala po tayong matibay na ibidensya siya laban sa mga gumagawa pa ng ganoon,” Zambales said.
The experience in Roxas reflects a gap at the national level that both PCSD spokesperson Jovic Fabello and Ramillo independently pointed out.
The Philippines drafted a national Dugong Conservation Action Plan around 2020, Ramilo said, but the status of its implementation within DENR’s Biodiversity Management Bureau remains unclear years later.
“Hindi natin alam kung anong status sa Biodiversity Management Bureau,” he said. Compounding the problem, he added, is the absence of a national repository consolidating conservation efforts across the country’s scattered dugong populations. This makes it difficult to know where protection exists, let alone whether it is working.
“Nasa DENR, BMB ang bola,” he said.
Angelique Songco, who spent 24 years building enforcement capacity as superintendent of Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, was blunt about what any form of dugong protection ultimately requires.
“Political will ang kailangan dyan,” she said. “Magbigay sila ng pondo para magbantay, magbigay ng pera para ang communities will support dugong protection.”
In her view, funding for patrols and community support are not separate needs. Both must be present, or nothing happens. “Kung walang mag-i-invest sa hinaharap — maglagay ng managers, turuan ang mga bata about conservation — mawawala talaga yan,” she said.
What it would take
Busuanga and Roxas represent two versions of conservation at different stages. In one, the necessary elements accumulated over time. In the other, progress was interrupted by a climate change-induced super typhoon and never resumed.
Roxas is not starting from nothing. Malcampo already has a functioning, community-patrolled Marine Protected Area and a barangay captain who has managed it for more than a decade. Barangay 1 already has a designated fishing-zone system, a community monitor, and residents who can distinguish one mother-and-calf sighting from the next.
What Busuanga added to a similar foundation was continuity: an NGO partnership and a cooperative structure that turned protection into a source of income for the community.
Whether that gap can be closed elsewhere in Palawan is, in Songco’s words, no longer a question of whether the threat is understood.
“We have a loaded gun, which is climate change. Whether it goes off is not a matter of choice,” she said.
“We have to shape up so that we will not lose species like the dugong during our watch,” Songco stated. (with reports from Gerald Ticke, Emman Magpusao, and Celeste Anna Formoso)
*** This story was produced by Palawan News with support from the Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
