Common stingray

A flat, diamond-shaped ray with a bluntly pointed snout, smooth skin and no dorsal fin worth mentioning. The upper side is a plain olive-grey to muddy brown, sometimes with a faint scattering of darker freckles, and the underside is creamy white with a dark margin. The tail is a long whip, usually about as long again as the body, carrying one or two backward-pointing serrated spines on its upper surface roughly a third of the way along. Most rays divers meet around Malta are 30 to 50 cm across the disc; a big female can reach about 60 cm across and well over a metre in total length with the tail included.

It is a sand specialist. It settles on a clear patch, shuffles until only the eyes and the twin spiracles behind them are showing, and waits, breathing through the spiracles rather than through the mouth buried underneath. Disturb one and it lifts off in a slow ripple of the disc edges, glides a few metres and settles again. At night it works the sand actively, blowing pits to expose worms, small crabs and buried bivalves.

Around the Maltese islands this is the ray a diver is most likely to meet, and it has been described as common here for over a century. Look for it on the open sand between Posidonia patches and at the sandy foot of a reef, from about 3 m in sheltered bays down to 40 m and beyond. It is easy to swim straight over one without noticing, because the outline under a dusting of sand is only a soft diamond-shaped shadow with two raised eyes.