---
title: Whitespotted Guitarfish (Rhinobatos punctifer)
scientific_name: Rhinobatos punctifer
common_name: Whitespotted Guitarfish
taxon: Guitarfish
conservation_status: NT - Near Threatened
published: 2024-11-04T11:40:47.798Z
updated: 2026-08-23T10:20:27.637Z
tags: Whitespotted Guitarfish, Rhinobatos punctifer, Guitarfish, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/whitespotted-guitarfish
---

# Whitespotted Guitarfish (*Rhinobatos punctifer*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Guitarfish (*Rhinobatidae*)
- **Size:** up to 89 cm
- **Depth:** 70-150 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Deep sand and mud bottom, below seventy meters
- **Reproduction:** Live-bearer
- **CITES:** Appendix II
- **Conservation status:** NT - Near Threatened

## How to recognise it

- small white spots scattered over the back and sides
- small for a guitarfish, under a meter
- deep, from about seventy meters down, so not seen on ordinary dives
- up to 89 cm

Almost everything known about this animal comes from trawl nets rather than from anyone watching it.

It lives between seventy and a hundred and fifty meters on soft bottom, which puts it below diving depth and squarely inside the working range of commercial trawlers. That is the situation for a large share of the sea's continental shelf fauna: the species are catalogued, measured and assessed from dead specimens brought up in nets, and their behavior is essentially unrecorded. We know what this ray looks like, what is in its stomach and roughly how many are caught. What it does with its day is guesswork.

It is a small guitarfish, under a meter, sandy brown with small white spots scattered over the back, and like its relatives it hunts buried invertebrates on soft bottom.

The depth cuts both ways. It keeps the animal away from the inshore gillnets that have emptied the shallows of its larger relatives, and it puts it directly in the path of bottom trawls, which take everything and are far harder to avoid than a net you can swim around. Deep is not the same as safe.

## Also known as

- **English:** spotted guitarfish
- **Arabic:** قيثارات البحر المنقطة, سمكة السوس, Salfooh
- **Hebrew:** גיטרן נקוד
- **Italian:** Pesce chitarra macchiato, Pesce violino macchiato
- **German:** Rotmeer-Geigenrochen, Rotmeer-Gitarrenrochen
- **Portuguese:** Raia-viola-pintada
- **Dutch:** Rode Zee-gitaarrog
- **Czech:** pilohřbet skvrnkovaný

## Range

Red Sea

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/guitarfish/whitespotted-guitarfish)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*