Common eagle ray

A big, unmistakable ray built like a delta wing. The disc is far wider than it is long and ends in sharply pointed wing tips, and the head is raised into a rounded, duck-billed snout that projects clearly in front of the wings - the quickest way to tell it from a stingray. The back is plain bronze, dark olive or near-black, the belly white, and a slim tail perhaps twice the body length carries a small dorsal fin and, just behind it, one or two serrated spines. Around Malta most are 50 cm to 1 m across the wings; the species reaches about 1.5 m and has been recorded to 1.8 m.

Unlike a stingray it rarely lies buried. It flies, flapping its wings in slow, deliberate beats, cruising a metre or two above open sand or drifting past a reef edge in mid-water. It feeds by settling briefly, blowing away sediment and crushing clams, whelks and crabs with flat grinding tooth plates, so a feeding animal leaves a line of shallow craters in the sand.

Around the Maltese islands it has been recorded as a frequent species for a hundred years, and divers meet it over sand flats and along the drop-offs of the north and north-east coasts, typically between 5 and 40 m. Something remarkable was documented off north-east Malta in October 2024, when a remotely operated vehicle filmed an estimated 100 to 150 eagle rays gathered on the seabed at about 50 m under a tuna ranch, apparently feeding on baitfish scraps sinking from the pens - the largest aggregation of the species known anywhere.