Overview
Status: Completed
Topics: Conservation, Research
Start date: 01/01/2016
End date: 18/01/2025
Parent project: Telemetry Lab
Project website:
Funding institutions: MAVA Foundation
Target species: Spinetail devil ray
Tethys role: Leader
Project leader: Tethys Research Institute
Project manager for Tethys: Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara
Simone Panigada
Project partners: Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Italy
National Research Center, Gaza City, Palestine
Project subcontractors:
Project staff: Viola Panigada
Project other staff: Mohammed Abudaya, Simonepietro Canese, Giacomo Milisenda
Milestone project:
Detailed description
To investigate the seasonal migratory behaviour of spinetail devil rays, Mobula mobular, across the Mediterranean Sea, satellite telemetry was used to track nine individuals between 2016 and 2021.
Results
While broadly distributed during summer across the more productive areas of the western and central portions of the Mediterranean, most tracked rays showed an eastward movement towards eastern Levantine waters during the second half of the year. One individual, tagged off Gaza in March 2016, travelled to Spain before swimming back to the Levantine Sea one year later. Our study corroborates the notion that the species undergoes predictable basin-wide migrations across the Mediterranean Sea, favouring the Levantine waters in late winter and early spring, thanks to the subregion’s milder sea surface temperatures in that time of the year compared to the rest of the Mediterranean. Understanding the species’ seasonal movement pattern in the Mediterranean could support the implementation of robust place-based conservation measures, especially in light of unregulated fishing pressure.