Our museums and galleries house fascinating collections, from living bugs to The Beatles, fine art to photography, the Titanic to ancient Egypt.
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Our museums and galleries house fascinating collections, from living bugs to The Beatles, fine art to photography, the Titanic to ancient Egypt.
Raywatch
The UK is home to at least 11 species of egg-laying skates which use the shallow waters around our coast to breed and lay their eggs. They are very slow growing animals which produce relatively few young after taking over a decade to reach sexual maturity. They are thus struggling to thrive under today’s commercial fishing pressure such that the once Common Skate is now considered to be practically extinct from the Irish Sea.
The Thornback Ray (Raja clavata) is usually found on sediment type seabeds such as mud, sand or gravel at depths between 10-60m. Like all rays it has a flattened body with broad, wing-like pectoral fins. The thornback ray owes its name to its rough skin texture as well as the enlarged, thorn-like scales ('bucklers') that run along the midline of the back and tail and also occur along the side of the body (near the pectoral fin base).
A ray at World Museum aquarium
When our rays are caught anglers and commercial fishermen will notice their colourful tags and call us. They will receive a £4 reward for providing key measurements and the location that it was caught before returning the ray to the sea.
Each time your ray is caught we will email you with the location and add your rays’ journey to our online map, which you can see below.
Your ray could be caught more than once or may be particularly secretive and manage to evade being caught at all!
In this case we will send updates on all of the rays in the RayWatch project so that you can see where the tracked Thornback Rays are appearing and how much they’re growing.
You can visit rays at World Museum and learn more about them in our aquarium.
Rays at World Museum aquarium