The Insane Biology of: The Giant Manta Ray

The world of mobular rays transcends the barriers between the oceans, the borders between the shallow seas and the cold depths of the ocean and even the last barrier of the ocean, the one between the sea and the sky, which is found in the seas tropical and temperate species from around the world, the genus mobula contains some of the most incredible organisms to ever grace this planet, there are over 600 species of rays in the ocean, but only 11 different species of mobul, all of which have a Distinctive diamond-shaped appearance with wings that allow them to glide through the water and perform impressive displays of elegance. and Agility, some are small and congregate in incredible numbers, occasionally flying out of the water in acrobatic leaps, others are absolutely enormous, so enormous that their Elegance seems to defy gravity.

The

giant

oceanic

manta

y is the largest Reay species in the world with a wingspan that can reach more than 8 m, their large size makes them a surprising presence in the ocean that captivates researchers and divers who are lucky enough to find them, but in addition to being huge, they are also gregarious and often as curious about human swimmers as swimmers are about them. and this is because the ocean

giant

is incredibly intelligent, it has the largest brain of all fish with a brain-to-body ratio that exceeds that of the enormous whale shark and it turns out that giant

manta

rays are much more mysterious than scientists realize. they thought. until very recently we didn't even know how to categorize them until 2018, scientists included the giant manas and the reef manay in the genus Manta, but further analysis of their morphology and genetics resulted in scientists placing them in the genus mobula along with the smaller manta rays and now Scientists are learning that the giant oceanic manay is not the animal they once thought it was;

It is not simply a shallow-water plankton eater, but a deep-sea renegade with movement so efficient that teams of roboticists around the world are working to emulate it and not only. Does it dive deeper than we ever thought and move more efficiently than we ever thought? To the surprise of the world of science, the giant manta ray has been observed to rapidly change the color and pattern of its skin, something that is basically unheard of in the world of Elasmo Branks. The giant ocean manta is very intelligent and is still absolutely full of mysteries. Why did the ocean's giant manta ray evolve to become so huge and how does a huge body move so efficiently?

What do they do when they dive into the cold, dark depths and what does it do? means that when they change color when the giant oceanic manta ray glides through the water, it flaps its enormous pectoral fins giving the appearance of flying when rays split from sharks about 200 million years ago, the pectoral fins expanded until they became in what we now call stripe. dis and for the oceanic giant manta ray this expansion was extreme, its wings can reach more than 8 m wide and its pectoral fins represent around 85% of its body length, for sharks of similar size, their pectoral fins represent only 10 to 15% of its length. the length of its body, but what benefit do such massive wings offer compared to the more typical body plan of a shark?

One clue comes from looking at the behavior of the giant manta ray compared to the similarly sized great white shark. The great white shark is a fast and powerful swimmer, but its bursts of speed changes usually only occur in One Direction. It is difficult for a great white shark to turn in an instant. Compare this to the giant manta ray. It is often seen swimming in tight acrobatic circles circling to eat clumps of plankton or evade predators. Its maneuverability and agility. are almost unheard of in such large animals and it is thanks to the large, flexible wings of the giant manta, while the general shape of a man's wing is similar to the wings of birds, these fins can undulate and bend in many more ways than the wings of birds.

It has numerous support structures within the pectoral fin and all of these structures can be controlled separately, but as useful as maneuverability is in evading predators, it comes at a cost. Maneuverability is simply a controlled inability and without stability an animal cannot move steadily and efficiently along a predictable path. Fortunately, the giant oceanic manta ray strikes a balance between these opposing qualities and is maneuverable while maintaining stability and efficiency. One way the giant manta ray maintains stability is by having wings with a fairly high aspect ratio during flight in the sea or in the sky for a longer time.

Narrower wings give the plane more stability. It's like a tight RPP walker that holds a long stick while they walk. The extra length helps balance the body. The wings are not exactly long and thin like glider wings, but their length helps with balance. The animal while it slides. High aspect ratio. The wings also help to generate lift efficiently and the way the giant manta moves its pectoral fins also allows its swimming to be highly efficient and sometimes surprisingly fast. On average, giant manta rays swim about 9 mph or 14 1/12 km. per hour, but to evade danger they can run at a speed of up to 22 mph or 35.5 kmph to reach these speeds they combine oscillations of the fins with undulations.

Oscillations are the flapping of the wing up and down, generating large forces of propulsion and lift, but at the same time. As the wing oscillates up and down, it also undulates sending a traveling wave from its body to the flexible tips of its wings. As the giant rays flap in this way, its fins disturb the water and create vortices that push against the surrounding water and They propel the animal forward. and these two types of movement make the giant manay an extremely efficient swimmer. Scientists have measured propulsion efficiency at 89% to understand more about the

biology

of manta rays.

I spoke with Jessica Pate, founder of the Florida Manta project and research scientist at the Marine megap Foundation basically manta rays have to keep swimming in order to breathe, so they are designed to swim, you will never see one resting on the bottom, so they are designed Very hydrodynamically efficient, they have a more pointy diamond-shaped body structure where normally as a bottom-dwelling stingray it will be rather round so they can get a lot more power from the tips of their wings. It's so powerful and efficient that researchers are designing autonomous underwater vehicles modeled after giant manes that they hope these bioinspired machines will be able to help map the sea floor, conduct search and rescue missions, and survey underwater technology in much more ways. agile and efficient than current systems.

Due to their pancake shape and flapping wings, one might assume that mobulas are a larger version of manta rays. It's true that they all belong to the elasmus bran subclass of cartilaginous fish, as do sharks and rays, but there are some significant differences between mobulas and manta rays. Mobulas have mouths on the front of the body rather than underneath. They also have calico loes, which are two fins. Calyx-shaped appendages around the mouth, unlike the anterior part of most manta rays, these calyx loes do not have any electrosensory abilities, but are there to help channel water and plankton directly into their mouths. calic loes make mobula rays the only vertebrate with six paired appendages. instead of four, two for the mouth, two pectoral fins that act as wings and two pelvic fins at the back and, although manta rays have long stingers in most mulus species, including giant manta rays, their tails have They've lost their ability to bite and sometimes people don't realize this, but one of their other differences is something you can't see unless you get up close to any of these animals and that's their teeth.

Manta rays have crushing dental plates that help them feed on crustaceans and fish. Mobular rays on the other. The hands only have teeth on the lower jaw and these are small, uneven peg-shaped teeth, quite useless for chewing nowadays, only used for mating when males cling to females rather than crushing their prey. Manta rays are filter feeders when plankton is abundant. They open their mouth and swim through it. They cannot suck up everything in their path. They simply travel towards the large oral cavity and pass through their rakes. Gil, manta rays are like giant flying sieves that filter out the tasty bits. teeth to filter feeding dates back to sometime before 50 million years ago in the fossil record, perhaps after the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, when other ocean-dwelling planktivores disappeared by opening a large environmental niche, there was also a geological event called the Paleocene eosin thermal maximum around 55 million years ago.

Years ago, global temperatures rose by 5 to 8°C, triggering a boom in plankton growth. Whatever the reason, the manteras became voracious eaters of plankton and because of this something more remarkable occurred. Manta rays became giants, but how did a diet of tiny plankton drive these creatures to become so large, researchers have discovered that gigantism is not limited by the trophic level, also known as the type of food they eat. an animal eats, but rather by the quality and abundance of that food and the animals' ability to exploit it. There is a biological theory about it. This concept called the police rule hypothesizes that evolutionary lineages tend to increase in size over time because being larger improves the survival of Apex carnivores.

This is only true to a point, there's not much point in being bigger than a size where you have no enemies and can prepare for anything you want, but for plankton consumers, bigger is almost always better. Being massive gives them a greater feeding range, as greater swimming efficiency allows them to travel farther in search of plankton and greater energy storage. Ena travels further between patches of rich feeding grounds. A bigger mouth. and a larger surface area also allows them to process a lot more water and collect a lot more plankton and perhaps the biggest advantage of being so large is that they are less likely to eat you when the manta rays are grown adults, they have very, very few predators. they're actually just killer whales, there's actually recent killer whale predation in Hawaii on a manta or large sharks in most of Beque, one of our study sites.

They have a very healthy bull shark population and 75-80% of their manta rays have shark bites on them but they are surviving because they are simply taking small pieces off their backs, however history has shown us that large animals run higher risk of extinction because large organisms are often more vulnerable to environmental shocks due to their need for more resources such as food. In addition to their long reproductive phases, organisms that reproduce within the span of a few weeks are much more likely from undergoing rapid evolution than something like a mantay in which pregnancies last a full year and females only give birth every few years. it's more similar to saying like an elephant than like another type of fish because they grow a lot but they reproduce very slowly so usually when you have that type of strategy you're surviving you have a higher survival because you have to because you're putting Basically everyone Their eggs are in this reproductive basket, but since the giant manay is gigantic and eats a lot of plankton, so far it has been worth the risk and for a long time we thought that the only thing they ate was shallow water plankton, we saw them wandering around.

The shallow coastal waters open up to catch plankton and we thought that was the end of the story, but it turns out that manta rays don't just inhabit the sunny shallow waters, they actually dive deep, sometimes very deep. , to the midnight zone of the ocean. For decades, scientists have struggled to fully understand the lives of giant manta rays because they are simply difficult to track, they are known to travel great distances and when scientists are lucky enough to spot one, it is usually from a boat in shallow waters, so, for example, For a long time, all data on giant manta rays came from observations only in this environment.

But as time went on, some researchers had a hunch that there were morein the behavior of the manta rays from what they were seeing. To find out more, they traveled to Ecuador, where the largest number were found. Numerous giant manta rays are known to congregate here. They collected small samples of muscles from the rays, as well as samples of plankton. They wanted to find evidence in the striped bodies that their diet was composed of whole shallow-water plankton. To achieve this, they compared the isotopes of nitrogen and carbon in both the plankton and the muscle tissue of the mantay.

Nitrogen isotopes in particular are very useful because they can tell us what marine organisms have been eating because the proportion of nitrogen increases with each step in the food web; in other words, the top predators. like sharks and tuna will have a much higher proportion of nitrogen than something like plankton, which eat algae and carbon. Isotopes are useful in telling us the origin of food sources, for example, surface plankton and mopic plankton have different levels of carbon 13. What the researchers found in The Case of the Giant Manta Rays was that their chemical signature was not correlated with surface plankton.

It looked much more like they were eating food from the mopic, a much deeper layer of the ocean. Scientists later placed satellite tags on the manta rays and discovered that While diving to depths of 1,400 M, another group of researchers tagged Manas off the coast of Peru to see what its movements would be like throughout the day and discovered that three of the rays dived much deeper at night than is possible during the day. They stayed closer to the surface during the day as a way to warm up, as they are ectothermic, meaning they cannot produce much of their own body heat and rely on the surrounding temperature to keep warm, but deep dives are not the best option. unique. unexpected movements that these oceanic manta rays make, they also seem to move around their habitats in different ways than we once thought.

Giant ocean rays were long believed to be intrepid travelers who migrated great distances to feed in one go. A study that lasted more than 4 years and was based on citizen scientists along the East Coast of the US. The US collected more than five thousand sightings of giant manta rays and watched them move hundreds of miles up and down. Along the coast, depending on water temperature, they cannot make long-distance migrations. Our team just published a paper where they tracked a manta that traveled a thousand kilometers, so it's a pretty long-distance migration, but maybe not like the great white shark that swam from South Africa to Australia.

It's not that crazy, but a couple of years ago a mantay appeared on Cocos Island, which is in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Costa Rica, but it was a reef manay that stingrays are not known to see. reef. The eastern tropical Pacific and the closest place it could have come from is Hawaii, which is thousands of miles away, but other researchers who observed giant manta rays around Mexico and Indonesia found that the rays swam no more than 150 miles from where they were. they appeared for the first time. They were tagged, they became much more attached to their own neighborhood of Hood than the researchers expected, they also ate a diet that was very specific to their region, so their non-migration could be due to the abundance of food in those particular places , by finding and studying these more sedentary ones.

The populations could open a new chapter in many research and clearly we still have a lot to learn about them, including something that seems fundamental: can these mysterious creatures change the color of their skin? And, if so, how did we just discover this spectacular ability? Manas are usually described as having a main type of coloration called Chevron, which is a dark navy blue or black shade on most of their dorsal side with two white triangular patches on their head, their vental side or belly is largely white with different patterns and spots of black, but when observing captive IND individuals, researchers were surprised to see that the coloration of giant manta rays rapidly changed the skin around their eyes, mouth, the inside of their calico loes and the chevron shapes on their backs, all quickly became lighter or darker when the individuals were having intense social interactions or just before being fed, this is something our team is investigating, we were always a little skeptical about it because we never we had seen it and just with the way we do our research, like I said, it's quite different. than everyone else, so we normally look with the Drone and the sky and, while you can't necessarily tell who is who based on their dorsal coloration, as is often the case with the Drone, I can say that that was the first and the second . the third one just because they look slightly different and I look at hundreds of mantas all the time but one day I thought oh this is a new Manta and we walked in and it was the same Manta from 2 hours before but it looked dramatically different.

The entire color change reversed fairly quickly, but researchers don't really know how or why the giant manta rays put on such a show; We do know that they have good visual skills and large brains, so perhaps the color changes have to do with social behaviors. and this ability is not just limited to the giant ocean manta ray, the smaller reef manta has also been observed to change color; It's a tantalizing hint that these mantas are more complex than we might give them credit for. Another piece of evidence that suggests the extent of their intelligence is the mirror self-recognition test.

This experiment is generally believed to be one of the most reliable ways to measure an animal's self-awareness or self-recognition. For terrestrial animals like chimpanzees, it is quite easy to put some kind of mark on the animal that they cannot see without the aid of a mirror if they notice the mark on themselves in the mirror and respond to it, suggesting that they are aware of that the image in the mirror is their own body, while the researchers could not easily locate a When tagging the manta rays, the manta rays made significantly more repetitive movements in front of a mirror than in control conditions.

Their calico fin movements also increased almost as if they were grimacing at themselves. It's not quite possible to say whether they passed the mirror test, but the results are intriguing nonetheless and while it is difficult to quantify the intelligence of any animal, especially the giant one, we do know that they have the largest brain of all fish and in the genus mobula the telen seylon is the largest part of the brain and represents 61% of the total mass, this is also the area of ​​the brain associated with memory, learning complex social behaviors and higher sensory processing, and not only They have a big brain because they are a giant animal, they have a big brain for their body size, so we think that manta rays are probably quite intelligent, probably because they are very social creatures and you know a lot of divers or people who have been in the water with them.

You know they're always like that. I have a feeling The Mantel was watching. I or we have experiences when they get tangled in a fishing line and they just stop swimming and let you take it all away and then they swim away and they really have complex lives and they are very intelligent, they are more similar sometimes. I say they look more like a dolphin than a normal fish. There are so many characteristics of the giant manta ray that make them unique, their brain, their behavior, their body, the list goes on, but many aspects of their lifestyle also make them increasingly vulnerable to extinction.

In 2018, the giant Mane was listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act because it feeds on plankton, it is also more likely to ingest large amounts of microplastics and we simply don't know what that could do to the health of the animals that live. For more than 40 years, they have also been exceptionally vulnerable to almost all types of fishing and, in shallow water habitats, are often struck by boats speeding past them. People also falsely believe that Manta Gill plates give health and vitality to those who eat them. They are killed in large numbers specifically for that single body part, but researchers are doing everything they can to understand many behaviors in order to protect them, whether by creating places that have special designations such as nurseries or by monitoring their movement from the place of origin. to the shallow waters.

The more we learn, the better we can make sure our activities don't interfere with theirs, and the more opportunities we'll have to get out on the water and watch them glide when this year comes to a close. I just wanted to thank each and every one of you for watching and allowing me and everyone who works with me on this channel to continue bringing you more and more videos on the topics we care so much about, it's literally a dream come true your support by watching, sharing and giving likes. videos and signing up with our sponsors keeps the channel alive and thriving and now there's a new project: I'm creating a five-part documentary game show called Archeology Quest which I produced and starred in with my co-writer and friend Lorraine this This is probably the biggest project in which I have participated.

It's a mix between serious archaeological education and then our absolutely ridiculous attempts to take what we've learned about ancient technology and put it to the test in a series of one-on-one competitions. another with the ultimate question: who will manage to create a meal using only Paleolithic technology? This will only be available on Nebula and will be available soon last year. I know thousands of you signed up for what we call the package to get access to the curiosity stream. and nebula for a price at the same time, but we have a big update for anyone who participated in that package deal, the flow of curiosity has informed us and even included in their latest SEC filings that they have no intention of paying us for no income package. in 2024, even for accounts that still have access, if you purchased a bundle subscription or renewed in 2023, you will still have access to nebula until the end of your 12-month subscription, but unfortunately, in the future none of the money will go to to nebula and therefore will not go to the creators you probably signed up to support, we know we are not happy about this either if you are a user of the package and still want to support this channel by being a nebula subscriber in 2024, The only way to make sure your money goes to supporting us and nebula by signing up directly for bundle subscribers.

If you upgrade to a direct nebula subscription, you'll sign up and pay today, but we won't start the clock until your existing package and nebula access expires. Subscribers and new subscribers alike this holiday season, Nebula is offering lifetime memberships for $300. You'll get Nebula as long as you and Nebula exist. This is a way to raise capital for amazing creator-owned projects. Nebula is on a roll. with green lighting things like archeology quest, the new documentary game show I mentioned earlier, which was only made possible by your support at nebula, so if you sign up using the link below you can support this channel directly and get nebula classes and nebula for 40% off annual plans just over $2.5 per month or you can subscribe to a lifetime plan for $300, granting you access to every piece of content nebula creators will create while helping to fund new and exciting projects, and as we move forward.

As we approach Holiday Rush, it's good to know that Nebula Lifetime Plans can be purchased as a gift for someone else in the form of a gift card. It's the perfect gift for Nebula fans and content consumers of all kinds, and the only place you'll be able to see Archeology Quest check out.