Common stingray

Where does the common stingray live?

Home: Sandy sea floors of the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Türkiye, Tunisia, Morocco.

Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.

The short profile

Fully grown: disc about 45 cm wide, up to 1.5 m with the tail. It weighs about 4 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A stingray swims by rippling the edges of its flat body, so it seems to fly slowly through the water. Its mouth points downwards, hidden under the disc, and it hunts crabs, shrimps, worms and small fish that it senses through tiny pores in its skin which pick up the weak electric signals of living bodies. The spine on its tail is a weapon of defence only: it is used when something heavy steps on the ray, never for hunting, and a sting is painful but almost never deadly. Bathers on Mediterranean beaches are told to shuffle their feet through the sand so that a buried ray feels them coming and swims off. Females do not lay eggs; four to nine pups grow inside the mother and are born fully formed. The species is now listed as vulnerable, because so many rays end up in fishing nets meant for other fish.

Find it on the globe

Common stingray is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.