Young dugong tangled in a car fanbelt is carried over a sandbar back to sea by 15 rescuers

An all-hands rescue unfolded near Exmouth in Western Australia: a young dugong about two metres long was found struggling on Wednesday at Wapet Creek, tangled in a car fanbelt. Fifteen responders returned it to deeper water in less than 24 hours, and it swam off into Exmouth Gulf on its own.

Assess, free, then carry over the sandbar

Rescuers first assessed the dugong's health and consulted experts at Perth Zoo and the Sea World Foundation, then restrained it, cut it free, wrapped it in a cargo net and carried it over the shallows and a sandbar back to sea. The crew nicknamed it 'Wapi' after the creek where it was found; as it swam off, someone in the video could be heard calling out 'yadiyarra' — dugong in the language of the gulf's Baiyungu traditional owners.

An entanglement nobody had seen before

Sam Miles, acting marine program coordinator at Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), said this kind of entanglement was new to the team: 'We haven't seen entanglements in this kind of thing before, so we're not sure where it picked the entanglement up.' The good news was that Wapi showed no signs of major distress — and a quick report from a member of the public was what made the rescue possible.

Every dugong counts

Exmouth Gulf is home to Western Australia's second-highest concentration of dugongs, behind Shark Bay. 'Dugongs are endangered and we know that every dugong we save will help the overall population in the Exmouth Gulf,' Miles said. The backdrop is sobering: a record-breaking marine heatwave in the summer of 2025 devastated seagrass the dugongs feed on, and aerial surveys last month in Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria found the dugong population there had fallen by 50 percent in 20 years. Against that background, every successful release is hard-won — which is why Wapi's story has travelled so far.