The colorful one. Where the marbled electric ray is brown on cream, this species carries rosettes of orange, gold and dark brown, and a fresh one on clean sand is genuinely beautiful - which is unhelpful, because it is buried nine times out of ten.
It carries the same equipment: paired electric organs behind the eyes, built from stacked plates of modified muscle, capable of stunning a fish outright. The ray hunts at night, cruising slowly over sand, and drops onto prey to discharge and enfold it in one motion.
Divers meet it as a shape that materializes out of the bottom when it moves. It does not flee far and it does not threaten; the risk is entirely about hands and knees placed on sand that turns out to be an animal.
Its range is this sea, the Gulf and the western 🌊 Indian Ocean - a regional species rather than a widespread one, and the reason a card exists for two electric rays that look, to a first glance, like the same fish.
The species. Torpedo sinuspersici Olfers 1831 - sinus (bay or gulf) + persici (described from the Persian Gulf). ETYFish
- round disc patterned in orange, cream and brown rosettes, more colorful than its marbled relative
- short thick tail with two dorsal fins and a paddle tail
- no tail spine
- width up to 60 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
