Eastern Shovelnose Ray

Fascinating facts about the Eastern Shovelnose Ray

• Recent studies suggest the eastern shovelnose ray may have trichromatic colour vision due to three spectrally distinct cone visual pigments in the retina.
• Males grow a pronounced lower jaw and sharper teeth, giving them a stronger bite that they use to clasp a female’s fin during mating. The specialised jaws aren’t for different diets; they’re a mechanical advantage for successful reproduction, showing how anatomy can evolve for courtship rather than feeding.
• Females can give birth to anywhere from 4 to 20 pups after a gestation of just three to five months, far shorter than the year-long pregnancies of many related guitarfish. Larger mothers produce larger litters, linking body size directly to reproductive output and highlighting the species’ fast-growing life strategy.
• Females are generally larger than males in both mass and total length.
• Commercial trawlers in New South Wales and Queensland haul 75 % of the 100–150 tonnes of ‘fiddler’ rays each year, with catches doubling in winter as the rays move to shallower waters to birth pups. The seasonal spike links fishing pressure directly to their reproductive timing, underscoring a hidden vulnerability in their life cycle.

At a glance

About the Eastern Shovelnose Ray

The eastern shovelnose ray, Aptychotrema rostrata, glides over the sandy and muddy flats of Australia’s east coast, its flat, wedge-shaped disc and elongated, beaked snout giving it a silhouette as distinctive as a banjo’s body. Cloaked in sandy-brown tones with dark patches, a bold orange blaze ahead of each eye and a black tip on the snout, it moves with a gentle undulation of its broad pectoral fins, its dorsal eyes ever-watchful for prey. In the subtropical waters from southern Queensland to southern New South Wales, it frequents shallow estuaries, sandflats, and rocky reefs, yet occasional specimens have been recorded at depths of 220 m (720 ft). Its diet is a buffet of benthic life, fish, molluscs, carid shrimps, penaeid prawns, stomatopods, crabs, and even occasional squid, crushed by its replaceable, cone-shaped teeth that grind hard-shelled meals. A surprising trait uncovered by recent microspectrophotometry is its potential trichromatic colour vision, a rarity among elasmobranchs, suggesting a visual acuity tuned for bright, colourful habitats and perhaps a role in its complex mating rituals where males develop longer, sharper teeth and a pronounced lower jaw to grip a female’s fin during winter courtship. The species follows a tightly timed annual cycle: mating in the winter months of July and August, ovulating by November, and giving birth in the warm summer of March after a brief four-month gestation. Litters range from four to twenty pups, with larger females producing more offspring, and the newborns emerge at 13-15 cm (5-6 in) length. Their yolk-sac viviparous development, though not yet fully empirically verified, allows multiple embryos to share a large external yolk sac that sustains them until birth. As they mature, females grow larger and live longer, up to eleven years, while males, though smaller, boast stronger jaws for their mating grip, a striking example of sexual dimorphism shaped by reproductive strategy rather than dietary niche.

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