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Seagrasses provide shelters, nurseries, and feeding grounds for thousands of species, including endangered animals such as dugongs, stalked jellyfish and smalltooth sawfish.

A woman dressed as a dugong, a rare marine mammal, beseeched passers-by to end the burning of fossil fuels.

It also meant getting preapproval from authorities, dragging the dugong through security and dressing into its heavy felt in the still-hot desert environment of Dubai’s Expo City, where COP28 is taking place.

This characteristic, called pachyosteosclerosis, is absent in living cetaceans - the group including whales, dolphins and porpoises - but present in sirenians, another marine mammal group including manatees and dugongs.

An in-house research facility will study aquatic life in the Persian Gulf and support the conservation of local species, including the manatee-like endangered dugong.