Photo: Nuno Sá

A new paper from the Fish Ecology Lab and collaborators has documented the remarkable diving abilities of Chilean devil rays (Mobula tarapacana) in the central North Atlantic.  Dive profiles revealed that the rays are diving to depths of almost 2 km where they are encountering water temperatures as low as 3 degrees C. The rays were instrumented with pop-up satellite archival transmitting (PSAT) tags on Princess Alice seamount in the Azores. While definitive evidence is lacking, we assume that the rays are diving to forage on meso- and bathypelagic fishes that are abundance at depth in the central North Atlantic.  Check out the paper (open access) here:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140701/ncomms5274/full/ncomms5274.html