used this rare opportunity to ask a very simple but important question. The folks at Chaurami Aquarium in Okinawa Japan have manta rays and were fortunate enough to have a pregnancy and birth that they could study, which is something that would be effectively impossible in a field population. The babies come out rolled up like little chondricthyan burritos, it’s really very cool.
#Mother and baby manta ray full#
In every way they resemble full grown animals and they often have wingspans at birth that are a sizeable proportion of their parents. Mantas are in that group that gives birth to live offspring, but unlike most viviparous sharks and rays, its one baby at a time and what a baby! Myliobatids, which also includes devil rays, eagle rays, cownosed rays and their relatives, give birth to VERY well developed babies that are essentially immature adults. Myliobatids like this cownosed ray give birth to miniature adults.
Some sharks lay eggs (oviparous), while some give birth to live offspring (viviparous) and yet others have eggs that hatch in the uterus (ovoviviparous). Elasmobranchs (sharks and rays) are a different kettle of fish (wa wah!) various members of the group display a diverse range of reproductive modes that, in my opinion, are probably one of their evolutionary keys to success.
When we are ( as Stewie says) “incarcerated in that uterine gulag” for 9 months, we get all the food we need and, importantly, all the oxygen too, from that twisty lifeline to the placenta. In humans and other placental mammals, the embryo is attached to the wall of the placenta by the umbilical cord. In it, the authors use the birth of a baby Manta alfredi in the Chaurami Aquarium in Japan to study these largest and most charismatic rays, and the results provide evidence of a new and interesting mode of breathing in embryos, not previously known in the animal kingdom. In a remarkable turnaround, Craig directed me to a very cool new study about manta rays (next thing you know I’ll be sending HIM papers about energy availability in the deep sea…).
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