Spiny butterfly ray

Appearance

The snout is short and blunt. The tail is short and slender, measuring a quarter the disk width, with upper and lower fin folds. The coloration is dark brown above, sometimes with small lighter or darker spots and blotches in a marbled pattern, and white below.

The maximum published weight is 60 kg (130 lb).

Range and habitat

In the western Atlantic it is found from Massachusetts, United States to Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. It is rare in the Gulf of Mexico and common in the mouths of tidal creeks along the Virginia coast. In the eastern Atlantic, it is found from Portugal to Angola, among them Madeira and the Canary Islands. It is found in shallow brackish and coastal waters over soft sandy or muddy substrates, at a depth of 5–100 m (16–328 ft).

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Off Tunisia, they feed on crustaceans, teleosts, cephalopods, lamellibranchs, and gastropods, in descending order of importance. Teleost fishes apparently become more important in the ray's diet with increasing size.

Spiny butterfly rays are ovoviviparous and give birth to live young.

In crisis

Slow-reproducing and valued for its meat, in recent decades its population has experienced a decline of over 30%, and it has become Critically Endangered in certain parts of its range.

Spiny butterfly ray is 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 Spiny butterfly ray, Wikidata item Q3824131. 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.