Reef mantas spend much of their time visiting cleaning stations on coral reefs, allowing small fishes to scour every surface of their bodies for morsels of food. Reef mantas frequent the relatively shallow waters along the coastal reefs of continents and oceanic islands, these smaller mantas are highly social and often resident to a specific home range, migrating around these areas as they follow changes in the seasonal abundance of their planktonic food source. Oceanic Manta Ray appear to spend much of their time in the open ocean away from reefs, diving hundreds of meters into the deep scattering layer to find their zooplankton prey.įor specific information about their location and sightings please visit the Manta Trust hotspots page.ĭistribution: Found circumtropical in all oceans to 40 N (New Jersey, USA, and Honshu, Japan) and 40 S (northern Tasmania, Australia).Īge Maturity: unknown, but likely to be similar to Reef Manta Ray. The Oceanic Manta Ray is the largest ray species in the world, growing to a much larger size than its reef relative, with a disc width up to 700 cm (ft 23) in extremely large specimens, although the average size for most individuals encountered is usually around 4-5 meters. Mexico protection: NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010 under the category of Special Protection. Unlike in Oceanic Manta Rays, where the black T-shaped head marking extends down through the back to join the rest of the black-coloured body, maintaining a roughly even width throughout, in the Caribbean Manta the lower tail of the T tapers together towards the bottom where it joins the back.Īge of maturity: Similar to Reef and Oceanic Mantasĭistribution: Found throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, its range possibly extending further throughout the Atlantic OceanĪge Maturity: unknown, but likely to be similar to Reef and Oceanic Manta Ray. The coloration dorsally is a cross between de reef and oceanic mantas. The putative Caribbean Manta Ray is smaller than its oceanic cousin and more similar in size to the Reef Manta Ray.

However, although recent genetic analysis supports a degree of separation between these two groups, these remains uncertainly on the validity of this proposed speciation. It may well therefore be that some of the pioneering Oceanic Manta Ray that crossed the open ocean to the Caribbean found plentiful sources of food along the inshore reefs and began to diverge into a new species- essentially, nature replicating the evolution of Reef Manta Ray again. birostris¨ appears to occupy a similar niche to the Reef Manta Ray. This putative species ¨Caribbean Manta Ray Mobula cf. Throughout the reef habitats of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico there occurs a proposed third species of manta ray that is sympatric to the ocean manta ray in this region.

Anatomy of a giant manta ray