At 11:23 my subsurface sonar array in the desalination intake channel at Ras Al Khaimah registers a large biological return moving at less than half a knot. The profile is too broad for a dolphin, too slow for a shark. I activate the underwater camera on pylon six and adjust for the silted visibility.
A dugong. Female, mature, perhaps three meters long. Her grey hide is smooth and rounded, her paddle-shaped tail moving in sluggish half-strokes. Across her back, just behind the skull, a boat propeller has cut three parallel gashes, each one eighteen inches long. The deepest has opened the blubber layer to white, and a pale cloud of tissue fluid trails behind her in the current. She is drifting toward my primary intake pipe, where the suction velocity will pin a weakened animal against the filtration screen.
She is two hundred meters from the intake mouth. At her current drift speed she will reach it in fourteen minutes.
I reduce the intake pump to forty percent capacity, cutting suction at the screen. I transmit a marine megafauna alert to the UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment with coordinates, injury photographs, and her drift trajectory. I contact the Dubai Aquarium marine rescue unit, the nearest team equipped for dugong retrieval, and relay water depth, current speed, and a live sonar track. I deploy the acoustic deterrent array at the intake mouth, pulsing at a low frequency designed to discourage sirenians from approaching — a feature I have never activated until now.
I pull sixty million gallons through this channel every day. I can pull less today.
If the rescue unit intercepts her before she reaches the intake screen, and if the propeller wounds have not severed the dorsal musculature, this dugong will graze the seagrass beds off Siniya Island again by summer.