Spotted rays
| Spotted rays | ||||||||||||
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Spotted rays in the Sea Life Center in Speyer |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Raja montagui | ||||||||||||
| Fowler , 1910 |
The spot - or Spotted ray ( Raja montagui ) belongs to the family of genuine skates (Rajidae). It lives on the coasts of the northeast Atlantic from the Shetland Islands along the coast of the British Isles over the Bay of Biscay to the coast of Mauritania . It is also found in the southern North Sea and in the western Mediterranean to the coast of Tunisia and western Greece .
features
The body of the fish is rhombic, the snout short. The top is never completely spiked, there is only a central row on the back and top of the tail. It is brown and patterned with dark, often ring-shaped spots, the underside is white. The tail has two small dorsal fins far back . The fish reach a size of 80 centimeters.
Way of life
Spotted rays are found on sandy and muddy soft bottoms at depths of 20 to 120 meters, and in the eastern Ionian Sea at depths of less than 300 meters. They feed on bottom-dwelling invertebrates, especially crustaceans .
Like all Rajidae , they are oviparous , i.e. they lay eggs. In total, the females lay 24 to 60 eggs in a year. The eggs are covered by a square horn-shaped capsule with horn-like corners, which is 5.3 to 7.6 inches long and three to five inches wide. The young hatch after five to six months.
literature
- Bent J. Muus, Jørgen G. Nielsen: The marine fish of Europe in the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Atlantic. Kosmos, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07804-3 .
- Matthias Bergbauer, Bernd Humberg: What lives in the Mediterranean? Kosmos, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07733-0 .
Web links
- Spotted Rays on Fishbase.org (English)
- Raja clavata in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2008. Retrieved on 24 February, 2009.