A survey of nearly 200 recreational anglers in Palm Beach County, Fla., found that that just two out of three could identify a manta ray, and even fewer knew how to prevent accidentally hooking one, Pate and colleagues reported in the June 2021 Aquatic Conservation. Pate has seen several mantas with missing fin tips from entangled fishing lines, as well as “mantas that look like Christmas trees” with wings covered in jigs and lures. But its located in a heavily populated coastal area, where recreational fishing is popular - and a threat to rays ( SN: 8/2/21). Not only is it the first found in the area, it’s also the third nursery ever found globally, the team reported in 2020 in Endangered Species Research. Those efforts led to the discovery a manta ray nursery off the coast of southern Florida. To fill knowledge gaps and raise the public profiles of manta rays in the western Atlantic, Pate conducts aerial drone surveys, gathers accounts of citizen sightings and spends countless hours tagging, tracking and measuring the creatures. That makes instituting effective conservation measures difficult, because researchers know so little about the rays, such as population numbers or where they mate. “There’s just so little awareness that manta rays are present,” she says. That’s partly because these rays have slow reproductive cycles and typically produce just one pup per pregnancy, Pate says, and partly because the animals are susceptible to injury from boat strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.īefore Pate began studying oceanic mantas ( Mobula birostirus) off Florida, there was only one published study of sightings in the region. Mantas and devil rays are both mobula rays, a genus that includes nine species, nearly all of which are listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Now Pate and her colleagues have learned that hundreds of sicklefin devil rays - an elusive cousin of mantas - also call the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico home, her team reports April 24 in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom.
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