Feather-tailed stingrays
| Feather-tailed stingrays | ||||||||||||
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A feather-tailed stingray near Marsa Alam in the Red Sea. |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Pastinachus sephen | ||||||||||||
| ( Forsskål , 1775) |
The feather-tailed stingray ( Pastinachus sephen ) is a species of stingray that lives in large parts of the Indo-Pacific between the Red Sea and South Africa in the west and the East China Sea , Melanesia and the Arafura Sea in the east.
features
Pastinachus sephen has a diamond-shaped, very thick pectoral fin disc for stingrays, which is slightly longer than it is wide and has a strongly rounded snout. The tail is almost twice as long as the body and has the one or two poisonous spines typical of the family on the top, about a third away from the base of the tail and thus relatively far back. An upper fold of skin is missing, but the lower one is very pronounced. It starts in front of the sting and is two to three times the width of the actual tail. The top is uniformly gray-brown to black, the bottom almost completely white with a narrow dark border. The animals reached a total length of up to three meters with a weight of 250 kg.
Way of life
Feather-tailed stingrays live in shallow water from the intertidal zone to depths of 50 meters. Since they are very tolerant of the salinity of the water, they can migrate far up into rivers (in the Ganges up to 1600 km). The rays mostly hunt alone in lagoons, in front of and on reefs. Their prey consists of bony fish (e.g. pony fish or sole ), poly bristles , shrimp and mussels . You yourself are hunted by sharks and porpoises . When not hunting, they like to stay in smaller groups on the sandy seabed, where they burrow in a circle so that each ray looks in a different direction to protect them from predators. Like all stingrays, they are ovoviviparous , the disc of the young measures about 18 cm at birth.
literature
- Hans A. Baensch / Robert A. Patzner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas Volume 6 Non-Perciformes (Non-Perciformes) , Mergus-Verlag, Melle, 1998, ISBN 3-88244-116-X
Web links
- Feather-tailed stingrays on Fishbase.org (English)
- Pastinachus sephen inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . Listed by: Fahmi, White, W. & Manjaji, BM, 2009. Retrieved November 3, 2013.