Critically Endangered
Spotback skate
Atlantoraja castelnaui
Spotback skate is a shark or ray in the family Arhynchobatidae (order Rajiformes) — Atlantoraja castelnaui, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The spotback skate is the subject of a fishery and is thought to be overfished, resulting in Greenpeace adding the fish to its red list of fish to be avoided, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature listing it as an "endangered species".
It is a large fish, growing to over a metre in length.
Range and habitat
The Spotback skate are found in the Southwest South Atlantic Ocean from Rio de Janeiro State in Brazil to Argentina. In Argentina, they can be found as natives to the Argentinian Zoogeographic Province. Spotback skates may migrate only slightly or perform slight periodic backwards and forwards movement depending on ocean water temperatures.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The spotback skate's diet is a versatile and mainly piscivorous consumer. Their diet shifts with increasing body size and as a response to seasonal and regional changes in prey abundance and distribution.
Smaller spotback skate tend to consume decapods and the larger skates eat elasmobranchs and cephalopods. Collected egg capsules typically are rectangular and have horny process in each corner.
In crisis
As a result, commercial fishing has led to an overexploitation of the species and its consequent listing as an endangered species. Spotback skates are particularly vulnerable to extinction due to their large body size relative to other skate species. According to Dulvy & Reynolds (2002), skate species considered to be locally extinct have larger body sizes compared to all other skates.
Another study by García et al. (2007) also corroborated the notion that a large body size increased the extinction risk in elasmobranchs.
Spotback 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 Spotback skate, Wikidata item Q3753745. 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.
