Shagra Stingrays - a brief guide

Before I even met Sarah-Jane, we’d been in email contact via Emma at Oonasdivers.  Sarah-Jane had seen a stingray she didn’t recognize, and wanted to know if I could help with identification.  I’m not much into species id, but I’d done a bit of taxonomy work years ago and gave some ideas.  It was great to meet Sarah-Jane and dive Shagra, and unusual stingrays became a bit of a theme for the area during our brief time there.

Stingrays are, broadly speaking, the major warm-water representatives of the skate and ray group, replaced by skates when you move into cooler and deeper seas.  Stingrays are, effectively, ground-living sharks with heavily fused shoulder girdles.  These thickened, flattened shoulders support enlarged ‘hands’ that spread ahead of the snout and along the sides to form the disc.  As the disc does the swimming, the tail doesn’t need to and the fins have largely disappeared from the slender, whiplike tails – the tails which bear the infamous venomous spines.  There are eight families of stingray, one of them living in rivers, a handful of other ‘round ray’ families with regional ranges, as well as the specialized freeswimming eagle and manta rays in their own family.  The widespread ‘classic’ reef-flat tropical stingrays, however, belong to the family Dasyatidae – the whiptail rays.