Magnificent painting
portraying William Beebe's striped manta ray (© William M. Rebsamen)
In 1999, my book Mysteries of Planet Earth became the first cryptozoologically-oriented
book to include a specific section on what must surely be one of the most
strikingly beautiful mystery beasts ever reported, and its coverage was greatly
enhanced by the inclusion of a spectacular full-colour painting of this animal
- another first for it - prepared specially for my book by renowned
cryptozoological artist William M. Rebsamen (and which also opens this present
ShukerNature blog article). Neither of us realised at that time, however, that
only a few years later I would actually witness just such an animal, and in a
wholly unexpected manner. The following article – the most detailed that I have
ever prepared on this particular subject and constituting a ShukerNature
exclusive – contains not only all of the information that I included in my 1999
book but also various additional cases uncovered by me since then, including my
own afore-mentioned observation. So where better to begin it than with that
observation – and here it is.
On 20 July 2005, I was sitting in front of
the television at home in the UK, flicking idly between channels, when I
happened to click onto Channel 5, and within a few seconds beheld an
extraordinary sight. The programme being screened was a documentary entitled 'Whale
Shark: Journey of the Biggest Fish in the World'. However, the fish that I was
staring at in amazement was anything but a whale shark. It was a giant manta
ray Manta birostris - a huge, superficially nightmarish beast popularly
dubbed a devil-fish (see also here) due to its mouth's pair of demonic, horn-resembling,
laterally-sited cephalic fins, and its huge batwing-like pectoral fins,
uniformly dark on top, white below...except that this particular manta's
pectorals were most definitely not uniformly dark on top. Instead, they were
dramatically adorned by a longitudinal series of white v-shaped chevrons, and
also sported pure white wing tips. This spectacular vision soared gracefully
through its underwater domain for a few moments before the camera moved on to
other subaqueous delights, and it did not appear again.
Not having tuned in to this programme from
the beginning, I had no idea where the striped manta had been filmed, but the
very next section of the documentary stated that the whale shark star of the
show had now reached the Mozambique Channel,
apparently having travelled there from the Seychelles
region of the Indian Ocean.
So this may have been where the manta footage had been shot.
A typical, non-striped
specimen of the giant manta ray, as depicted in an 18th/19th-Century
illustration from Iconographia Zoologica (public domain)
What made this serendipitous sighting so
notable was that for a great many years (right up to the time when I viewed the
above-cited TV programme, in fact), mainstream zoology had tended not to
recognise the existence of mantas other than the mundanely standard
dark-dorsal, pale-ventral version. Yet there on screen was positive proof that
at least one manta of a decidedly more flamboyant variety was indeed real. Nor
was it unique. Several other specimens have been documented down through the
decades, exhibiting a range of patterns, and spied in many different oceanic
localities.
The earliest one that I have on record, and
which remains the most famous (it was the subject of William Rebsamen's
magnificent painting), was witnessed on 27 April 1923 by American naturalist
William Beebe and several others while aboard his expedition vessel Noma,
as it approached Tower Island in the Pacific Ocean's Galapagos archipelago. The
manta ray briefly struck the side of the vessel and then sped swiftly away
along the surface, providing its observers with an excellent view. According to
Beebe, who later sketched it:
From tip to tip of wings it was
at least ten feet, of somewhat the usual manta or devil-fish shape, except that
the wings were not noticeably concave behind, and the lateral angles were not
acute. The cephalic horn-like structures were conspicuous and more straight than
incurved. In general the back was dark brown, faintly mottled, while the most
conspicuous character was a pair of broad, pure white bands extending halfway
down the back from each side of the head. The wing tips also shaded abruptly
into pure white.
Documenting this dorsally-bicoloured manta
in his book Galapagos: World's End (1924), Beebe considered that it may
represent an unknown species.
Beebe's sketch of the striped
manta ray observed by him off the Galapagos archipelago's Tower Island in 1923 (public domain)
In Vol. 12 of the now-defunct International
Society of Cryptozoology's scientific journal Cryptozoology (covering
the period 1993-1996), German researcher Gunter G. Sehm's paper on striped
manta rays surveyed some other specimens. In 1924, fr example, a small manta
was harpooned off the shore reef at Kiribati's
Fanning
Island
(renamed Tabuaeran). Its dorsal surface was blue-black but also bore two large
ash-coloured v-shaped chevrons that spanned the entire dorsum from left
pectoral edge to right. In 1934 this specimen was deemed a new species and
dubbed Manta fowleri, but its separate taxonomic status is no longer
recognised.
In 1975, British
Museum
ichthyologist Alwyne Wheeler's book Fishes of the World contained a
colour photograph of a manta ray that appeared to have some white striping on
its right shoulder, although few details can be discerned because the picture
had been taken side-on. A year later, a book by Pierre Fourmanoir and Pierre
Laboute detailing the fishes native to the waters around New
Caledonia and the New
Hebrides included a colour photo of a manta
ornately adorned with dorsal white banding and cephalic fins. In his paper,
Sehm also included three hitherto-unpublished stills from a 30-second footage
of film showing a manta with a pair of striking, laterally-sited, v-shaped
dorsal markings, filmed off the coast of Mexico's Baja California by Sigurd
Tesche, which had been broadcast by German TV on 28 December 1989 within a
programme entitled 'Sharks: Hunters of the Seas'.
Correspondent Alan Pringle contacted me
shortly after watching, on 7 November 1999, a
BBC1 television programme 'Holiday Guide to Australia', to inform me that it
had contained a snippet of film depicting a manta with two converging
longitudinal dorsal white bands, filmed from above by a helicopter, as it swam
above a reef in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
A striped giant manta ray at
Hin Daeng, Thailand, on 30 November 2005 (© Jon Hanson/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)
I learnt from fellow crypto-enthusiast Matt
Bille that on 19 September 2003, yet another striped manta made an unexpected
television appearance, this time in the American reality game show 'Survivor',
when a manta ray sporting a very prominent pair of white shoulder markings,
resembling filled-in triangles along the body, cruised fleetingly just under
the clear waters off Panama's Pacific coast.
Not long after my own television sighting
in July 2005, I was informed of two separate webpages each containing a colour
photograph of a striped manta. One of these, which still appears here,
shows a manta with symmetrical lateral chevrons resembling those of the Baja California
individual, but it also has white rings around its cephalic fins, a pale patch
at the dorsal tip of its left pectoral fin (its right cannot be seen dorsally),
and what looks like a white dorsal tail surface. More photos of it have since
appeared on Wikipedia and elsewhere online, confirming that it does have a
white patch at the dorsal tip of its right pectoral fin too. It was photographed
at Hin Daeng, off Thailand.
The other page (no longer directly online
at http://www.accessnoaa.noaa.gov/images/monitor1.jpg but still accessible here - thanks to the Wayback Machine Internet Archive) – in a website run
by America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - showed an
ornately-marked specimen with very extensive white wing tips linked posteriorly
by a pair of white converging arcs, as well as white cephalic fins. No details
of where this photo was taken were given.
The striped manta ray
photograph formerly directly visible online in America's NOAA site (© NOAA – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational and review purposes only)
In short, a diverse spectrum of striped
mantas is on record, with no two alike, but collectively confirming that dorsally
bicoloured individuals do indeed exist. So how can they be explained?
Interestingly, some of them, notably Beebe's specimen, the Fanning Island manta,
and the Baja California example, have conspicuously shorter-than-typical tails,
and also the shape of their pectorals do not exhibit such marked convexity of
the front edge and concavity of the trailing edge as those of 'normal' mantas
do, leading Sehm to consider the possibility that these represent a separate
taxonomic form. Equally, however, sometimes genes linked to colour or body
pattern also influence the size or shape of an individual (pleiotropic genes),
so there is no guarantee that these morphological differences have independent
significance.
Moreover, it is known that attacks by other
fishes can leave white marks on the dark dorsal surface of a manta. In fact,
its dark pigment can even be removed merely by rubbing the surface, creating
pale patches. And the elasmodiver website's manta page states that the wing
tips often fade to white. Worth noting, incidentally, is that back in the early
2000s this latter site was one of the very few mainstream sources that openly
acknowledged the existence of striped mantas, stating at that time:
"Dorsum black or dark often with symmetrical white patches forming a
chevron across the shoulders".
Intriguingly, Sehm attempted to explain
away the white wing tips of Beebe's specimen as an illusion, claiming that what
Beebe and his colleagues saw was the white undersurface of the wing tips
upraised, fooling the observers into thinking that the dorsal wing tips were
white. However, I do not believe this interpretation - the NOAA website's manta
unequivocally possesses white dorsal wing tips, as did the specimen that I
watched in the whale shark film. Instead, judging from the elasmodiver
website's comments, it may be that white-tipped mantas are aged specimens.
However, so precise is the symmetry of the white markings on all specimens of
striped manta, whether they be wing tip markings, shoulder markings, or
chevrons, that this seems unlikely - as do, for the same reason, explanations
invoking injury or rubbing as the source of such markings.
A striped manta ray at Hin Muang, Thailand on 30 November 2005 (© Jon Hanson/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)
In 2005, within a Fortean Times
article of mine devoted to these mystery mantas, I expressed the view is that a
mutant gene allele was most probably responsible, engendering on rare occasions
these stunning and sometimes quite elaborate patterns in mantas - analogous,
perhaps, to black-and-white specimens of blackbirds, black bears, crows, and
other normally monochromatic species, and creating an additional vision of
wonder and mystery amid the breathtaking splendour present beneath the surface
of our planet's mighty seas.
Sure enough, thanks to observations and
photographs taken of many additional specimens since then, the existence of
striped manta specimens is nowadays not only universally accepted among
ichthyologists but also, far from constituting a separate species, is deemed to
be nothing more than an expression of individual non-taxonomic variation within
the long-recognised giant manta species Manta birostris.
Unrelated to such considerations but still
worth noting, however, is that in 2009, a
second, somewhat smaller, and non-migratory manta ray species, the reef manta M.
alfredi, was officially distinguished, named, and formally described – see
my Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals,
2012, for more details.
A reef manta ray at Manta
Alley, near Komodo, Indonesia, in September 2010 (© Alexander Vasenin/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)
But this is not all. In autumn 2014, a
mainstream ichthyological discovery was made public via a scientific paper that
revealed an exceedingly significant but hitherto entirely unsuspected aspect
concerning the true nature of striped mantas. Ironically, however, this crucial
find has attracted relatively little attention, especially in cryptozoological
circles. Indeed, as far as I am aware, the following documentation of it by me
is the first time that this remarkable discovery has ever been referred to in
such a capacity, even though it holds the key to these distinctive fishes' very
existence.
Published by the Biological Journal of
the Linnean Society on 1 September 2014, the paper in question (click here
to read it in its entirety) was authored by Csilla Ari, from the University of
South Florida's Hyperbaric
Biomedical Research Laboratory, and revealed for the very first time that giant
manta rays possess the ability to change colour and pattern at will. Ari's
study showed that a manta's typical (or, as termed in the study, its baseline)
colouration state (i.e. its dark dorsal surface) can change rapidly at feeding
times, or if it encounters another manta ray in close proximity to itself, or
during intense social interaction between itself and another manta ray. And the
precise nature of this colour change is a very noticeable increase in the brightness
of hitherto pale, inconspicuous shoulder and pectoral wing tip markings.
In
other words, when faced with any of the situations listed above, a
typical dorsally-dark manta can transform directly into a striped manta!
A striped manta ray encountered
at South Point, Pulau Sipadan, off the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo, in
February 2010 (© Bernard Dupont/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)
Here is
the principal Results paragraph excerpted from Ari's paper, detailing this
extraordinary manta metamorphosis with reference to various 'before' and
'after' photographs of the mantas (these photos can be viewed directly if the
paper is accessed using the above link):
Captive manta rays were observed to undergo rapid changes (within a
few minutes) in their body coloration. Specifically, white markings appeared
and changed intensity on certain body regions (Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4; the two most
representative specimens from each species are shown). The intensity of the
white markings would increase rapidly to the ‘intense coloration state’ (Fig.
1D, E, F, G, H, 2D, E, F) more times during the day within a few minutes, and
then return to the normal ‘baseline coloration state’. Changes in coloration
were observed to occur in temporal proximity to a variety of situations,
including at feeding times (Fig. 1H), whenever a new manta ray was introduced
to the tank, and during intense social interaction between the two manta rays
(Fig. 1G). Feeding occurred twice a day and the rapid coloration changes
started shortly (5–10 min) before each feeding on both specimens. The ‘intense
coloration state’ was most intense during feeding and slowly returned to the
‘baseline coloration state’ over a period of 20–30 min after the end of the
feedings. In addition, rapid coloration changes were observed in association
with intense social interaction; for example, when Manta 2 was introduced into
the tank or when mantas were chasing each other rapidly and closely, which
appeared to comprise courtship behaviour.
In
short, the striped manta state was not even a permanent one. Consequently, it would
appear that in most if not all cases, such mantas that have been reported and
photographed in the past were nothing more than normal mantas exhibiting the
temporary pattern and colour transformation ability that had been discovered
for their species by Ari. (Incidentally, Ari also revealed that reef mantas
possess this same ability.)
The
mystery of the striped mantas is a mystery no longer. True, there may be
occasional specimens that do exhibit such markings on a permanent basis as an
expression of individual non-taxonomic variation, but in most cases such markings would seem
to be merely a temporary feature, induced on a non-permanent basis by various
fluctuating external stimuli.
Finally:
even though we now know the secret of the striped mantas, it is still thrilling
when one of these spectacular creatures turns up unexpectedly – and that is
precisely what happened to me a second time just last night. I had been
watching the 2016 Disney cartoon film Moana, whose storyline was
inspired by traditional Polynesian mythology and featured the famous demi-god
Maui, when suddenly, in a split-second segment right at the end of the film, an
animated striped manta sporting a vivid pair of white shoulder bars and
pectoral wing tips soared majestically through the water just beneath the
surface. A fitting finale, assuredly, for a movie of magic and mythology to
feature a maritime denizen so long associated with mystery and mystification.
My very own striped manta ray – a model of one that I purchased
at London Zoo in September
2014 (© Dr Karl Shuker/London Zoo)
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