Yesterday I found out that I get to see Andrea Marshall talk about her fascinating manta ray research again at the Birmingham Dive Show in October. I’m so excited about this and thought it’s about time we got up to speed with what she’s been upto.

Following the discovery of a second, larger species of manta ray in Mozambique and the successful tagging of two manta birostris (as documented in Andrea: Queen of the Mantas) Andrea and her team (Simon Pierce and Juerg Brunnschweiler) have gone global. Ray of Hope is a worldwide research project, funded by the Save our Seas Foundation, to study the migratory patterns of giant manta rays across six major aggregation sites (Brazil, Mozambique, Japan, Mexico, Thailand and Australia or the Red Sea).

Initial findings from the tagging efforts in Mozambique support speculation that unlike the smaller reef manta, typically resident to coastlines or island groups, these giants travel through great distances and depths in search of food – making them more ‘oceanic’. The aim of the project is to find out ‘where and how far [...] individuals travel’ to establish migratory habits and raise awareness about conservation issues to ‘manage populations effectively in the future’.

During July Andrea did indeed travel to her next major aggregation site and made history by successfully tagging a giant manta near the offshore rock Laje de Santos in Southern Brazil. Tags are programmed to detach from the mantas after six months and float to the surface to begin downloading stored data on water temperatures, dive depths, light levels and GPS positioning, which is then transferred from an ARGOS satellite direct to Andrea’s computer. Oh the wonders of technology!

Even though suspicions about a third species of manta ray have been circulating since Andrea’s discovery of a second species in 2009, following the disection of a museum archive specimen, until now there hasn’t been an awful lot of proof. But then Andrea had never visited Holbox in Mexico before and had the opportunity to tag, not one but two(!!!) of these strange non birostris nor alfredi (reef manta) forms of ray.

I hope that during her talk at the dive show she’ll be able to tell us a bit more about this unconfirmed third species – its similarities/differences to manta birostis and show us some more breath-taking footage of her experiences during the last year.

See more:

• Foundation for the Protection of Marine Megafauna;
• Andrea Marshall’s Save our Seas blog;
• Video of manta ray tagging;
• Marshall, A. Leonard, J. and Bennett, M. (2009) Redescription of the genus Manta with resurrection of Manta alfredi (Krefft,
  1868) (Chondrichthyes; Myliobatoidei; Mobulidae). Zootaxa 2301 pp. 1-28.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Conservation and tagged as animals, biology, diving, environment, manta rays, science. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.