Endangered rays discovered at Aliwal Shoal
With the shortfin devil rays being highly endangered, Michelle was ecstatic to find a large number of them in one place on the coast.
Over the years, thousands of divers and tourists have explored one of the greatest and most exciting scuba diving locations in the world, the Aliwal Shoal in Umkomaas.
Aliwal Shoal is one of two Marine Protected Areas (MPA) on the KwaZulu-Natal Coast and is home to numerous sharks including black tips and ragged tooth sharks who know have to share their home with new residents.
It was recently discovered that the Aliwal Shoal has also become a home to a number of the highly-endangered shortfin devil rays.
These rays use the area as a cleaning station and this discovery was made by local KZN diver and PhD student, Michelle Carpenter.
“Cleaning stations are important areas on a reef where a marine animal, such as a ray, turtle, shark, or fish, will visit to have parasites removed or wounds cleaned by cleaner fish,” said Michelle.
“These sites function as resting areas and mating grounds for hundreds of marine life species.”
Michelle came across the cleaning station last year, but didn’t know for sure how many ray actually lived in or visited the area.
“I’ve been working on my project for over a year now, which means visiting the site almost daily for field work, and have been overwhelmed by the incredible ray diversity as well as the numbers being encountered,” she said.
“In fact, Aliwal Shoal has even more diversity in terms of rays than it does sharks.”
A fun fact most people do not know is that sharks and rays belong to the cartilaginous group of marine fishes called ‘elasmobranchs’.
Michelle explained that the Aliwal Shoal is fortunate to be home to one of the world’s first discovered devil ray cleaning stations, following another such discovery at Bazaruto Archepelago.
With the shortfin devil rays being highly endangered, Michelle was ecstatic to find a large number of them in one place on the coast.
“Some places, such as Tofo in Mozambique, have experienced a decline in sightings of these rays by more than 90 percent in the past few years,” she said.
“This makes the discovery at Aliwal Shoal that much more profound, but it’s not only the numbers of devil rays, it’s also the diversity of ray species that is so astounding.
Spotted eagle rays, honeycomb whip rays, reticulate whip rays, leopard whip rays, blue stingrays, bluespotted stingrays, Jenkins stingray, round ribbontail rays, and even the critically endangered whitespotted wedgefish have also been spotted in the area.
Divers also seldom get a glimpse of giant manta rays, reef manta rays, longhorn devil rays, bull rays and even the extremely rare bowmouth guitarfish.
“In various freediving encounters I have been immersed by a school of 50 devil rays, hugged by a giant manta ray, nearly sandwiched by two barrel rolling giant manta rays, and been face-to-face with spotted eagle rays,” added Michelle. “It is all truly magical.”
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