A big plain ray with no markings to work from, which is why the bumps matter. Run your eye down the midline of the disc and onto the tail: an irregular row of enlarged tubercles, coarse and clearly raised, is the field mark. On a large individual it is visible from several meters and it is the difference between naming this animal and shrugging at a brown diamond.
It is a night worker. Tracking studies put its nocturnal range at roughly seven times its daytime range, with activity peaking a couple of hours after sunset and again before dawn, and the daylight hours spent lying half buried and doing nothing. It hunts by excavation, blowing and digging buried crustaceans, worms and small fish out of soft bottom, and jacks follow it around to take whatever escapes.
Here it is genuinely uncommon and mostly deep: it has been photographed at Eilat, at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, and it lives well below the depths most divers work.
The IUCN lists it as Vulnerable. It is a slow-breeding animal that gives birth to a handful of live young, and it lives on exactly the soft inshore bottom that gets trawled.
It is not aggressive and will move off if approached, but it carries a serrated venomous spine on the tail and the usual rules apply: shuffle on sand, do not corner one, and never approach from directly above.
The genus. Bathytoshia Whitley 1933 - bathýs (deep). ETYFish
- large plain olive to brown diamond, white below
- a row of enlarged tubercles down the midline of the disc and along the tail
- tail longer than the disc, with a fold underneath and none on top
- snout projecting past the leading edge of the disc
- disc up to 1.5 m across
