Critically Endangered
Flapper skate
Dipturus intermedius
Flapper skate is a shark or ray in the family Rajidae (order Rajiformes) — Dipturus intermedius, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The flapper skate has a long and pointed snout, the length of the snout is between 3.7 and 5.1 times the diameter of the orbit. The disc is roughly rhomboidal in shape with a deeply concave front edge. There is a row of spines along the centre of the tail in front of the dorsal fins and the spines on the sides of the tail point headwards.
The distance between the wingtips is around 2.4 times the total length. The flapper skate has a maximum published total length of 285 cm (112 in), and is the largest species of skate in the world, and a maximum published weight of 113 kg (249 lb).
Range and habitat
The flapper skate occurs in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean, its range overlapping somewhat with that of the blue skate, with most records coming from southern Norway and off the northern coasts of Scotland and Ireland. This species is a demersal fish found on the continental shelf and slope at depths between 20 and 1,500 m (66 and 4,921 ft), even so, it is mainly found at depths of less than 200 m (660 ft). The flapper skate is found in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean, although its range has contracted to a considerable extent due to overfishing, and it is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as Critically Endangered.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Sharks and rays grow slowly and have few young. A fishery that treats them as bycatch can empty a coastal form.
In crisis
The flapper skate is assessed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN and there are indications that has been extirpated from some parts of its range, such as the southern North Sea. It is now prohibited from being landed in the United Kingdom and the European Union, two polities that cover most of the remaining range of this species.
Flapper skate is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Flapper skate, Wikidata item Q61885258. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
