Butterfly rays
| Butterfly rays | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the family | ||||||||||||
| Gymnuridae | ||||||||||||
| Fowler , 1934 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Gymnura | ||||||||||||
| van Hasselt , 1823 |
The butterfly rays ( Gymnura ) are a genus of rays. They live cosmopolitan in all oceans on the coasts of tropical and warm temperate seas, also in the brackish water of river mouths.
Butterfly rays have a body disk that is 1.5 times wider than it is long. The upper surface of the body is bare or, in large species, sometimes covered with tubercles. The tail of the Gymnuridae is very short compared to other rays. The dorsal fin is missing, a poisonous caudal fin spine may be present or absent.
The animals often grow very large. Most species reach spans of 1.50 to 2.50 meters, Gymnura altavela even 4.0 meters. They feed mainly on crustaceans and mussels .
Systematics
There are 15 species of butterfly rays :
- Gymnura afuerae (Hildebrand, 1946)
- Gymnura altavela (Linnaeus, 1758)
- Gymnura australis (Ramsay & Ogilby, 1886)
- Gymnura bimaculata (Norman, 1925)
- Gymnura crebripunctata (Peters, 1869)
- Gymnura hirundo (Lowe, 1843)
- Gymnura japonica (Temminck & Schlegel, 1850)
- Gymnura lessae Yokota & Carvalho, 2017
- Gymnura marmorata (Cooper, 1864)
- Gymnura micrura (Bloch & Schneider, 1801)
- Gymnura natalensis (Gilchrist & Thompson, 1911)
- Gymnura poecilura (Shaw, 1804)
- Gymnura sereti Yokota & Carvalho, 2017
- Gymnura tentaculata (Müller & Henle, 1841)
- Gymnura zonurus Bleeker, 1852
literature
- Joseph S. Nelson : Fishes of the World . John Wiley & Sons, 2006, ISBN 0-471-25031-7 .
- Kurt Fiedler: Textbook of Special Zoology, Volume II, Part 2: Fish . Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena, 1991, ISBN 3-334-00339-6 .
Web links
Commons : Butterfly Rays - Collection of images, videos and audio files
- Butterfly rays on Fishbase.org (English)