The Southern Stingray (Dasyatis americana)

The Southern Stingray is a whip-tail stingray that is dorsally brownish in color and is found in the Western Atlantic Ocean from the top of North America down to Brazil in South America. It is a sub-tropical to tropical species of a nocturnal predator that spends its life on or near the seafloor that feed on fish, bivalves, worms, and crustaceans by vigorously flapping its wing to expose the organisms hiding in the sediment. These stealth predators have pointed wings, a long spine at the base of the tail and can grow up to a max wing span of 1.5 meters for the females and the males grow to a disc width of 0.67 meters. Females can give birth to a litter of 2 to 10 pups once a year. Southern Stingrays are mostly solitary creatures but they can also can be found in pairs. On 6-2-15 by the Keys Marine Lab, we went out to a site called Coffin's Patch that was our first site showing a great amount of diversity and abundance of many marine species. At this site, I was able to observe a Southern Stingray slowly swimming along the bottom of the sea bed about 20 feet below the surface.

Dasyatis americana

Southern Stingray observed at Coffin's Patch