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.
The species.Rhinobatos punctifer Compagno & Randall 1987 - punctum (spot) + -ifer (to have or bear). ETYFish
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
The Spotted Guitarfish is taken in a variety of fisheries including demersal trawls, inshore set gillnets and set nets operating that are common throughout its range or through targeted fisheries in the northern Red Sea (Bonfil and Abdallah 2004). There is little information on catches of the Spotted Guitarfish as species-specific data is not always recorded, however, the high level of exploitation on its habitat is of concern. For example, in the Saudi Red Sea, the number of traditional vessels operating increased from about 3,100 to 10,000 between 1988 and 2006 (Bruckner et al. 2011). In Iran, there is increasing fishing effort with the number of fishermen going from 70,729 in 1993 to 109,601 in 2002 (Valinassab et al. 2006). In Pakistan waters, about 2,000 trawlers operate in shelf waters, targeting shrimp in shallow waters and fish in outer shelf waters (M. Khan pers. comm. 06/02/2017). The species is also taken as bycatch off Oman and the UAE but is usually only seen in small numbers at the markets (R.W. Jabado pers. obs.).
Marine habitats in the Gulf are experiencing high levels of disturbance and quickly deteriorating due to major impacts from development activities (including dredging and reclamation), desalination plants, industrial activities, habitat destruction through the removal of shallow productive areas and major shipping lanes (Sheppard et al. 2010) which is likely to impact this species. Little is known of this species’ biology or habitat but, like other guitarfishes this species may be vulnerable due to similar life history characteristics that lead to low productivity. Their young may use coastal nursery grounds that are easily impacted by habitat degradation through pollution and coastal development.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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