American stingray
| American stingray | ||||||||||||
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American stingray ( Hypanus americanus ) |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Hypanus americanus | ||||||||||||
| ( Hildebrand & Schroeder , 1928) |
The American stingray ( Hypanus americanus ), also known as the southern stingray , is a species of stingray and lives in the western Atlantic from north of the New Jersey coast to southern Brazil , the Caribbean and the northern Gulf of Mexico .
features
Hypanus americana grows to a maximum of two meters in length, but usually stays at 90 centimeters. It has a diamond-shaped pectoral fin disc that is a maximum of 1.20 meters wide and is only slightly rounded on the sides and the snout. The upper side shows no pattern and is mostly olive brown, rarely almost black, in young animals gray. The underside is white with a gray or brown border. A row of pointed warts runs along the back. It usually has two poison stings on its tail.
Way of life
The ray lives near the coast over sandy bottom and seagrass as well as in lagoons and reefs at depths of one to 25 meters. American stingrays live individually, in pairs, or in groups. During the day they often lie around inactive, covered by a thin layer of sand.
They feed on small bony fish , crustaceans and molluscs , which they actively hunt or dig up from the seabed. The American stingray only uses its poison sting for defense. It is ovoviviparous with litters of three to five young animals that are about eight inches long at birth.
The animals are not shy of divers. In the Cayman Islands , American stingrays were fed and accustomed to humans. Known as "Stingray City", this place is a popular destination for diving tourism.
Systematics
The ray species was described in 1928 by the American ichthyologists Samuel Frederick Hildebrand and William C. Schroeder under the scientific name Dasyatis americana . When the Dasyatidae was revised in mid-2016 , the species was placed in the genus Hypanus .
literature
- Robert Patzner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas. Volume 6: Non-Perciformes (non-perch-like) . Mergus-Verlag, Melle 1998, ISBN 3-88244-116-X
- M. u. W. Baumeister: Marine fauna. Caribbean and Florida . Ulmer Verlag, ISBN 3-8001-4164-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Last, PR, Naylor, GJP & Manjaji-Matsumoto, BM (2016): A revised classification of the family Dasyatidae (Chondrichthyes: Myliobatiformes) based on new morphological and molecular insights. Zootaxa , 4139 (3): 345-368. doi: 10.11646 / zootaxa.4139.3.2
Web links
- American stingray on Fishbase.org (English)
- American stingray on the IUCN Red List