Thorny skate


The thorny skate is a species of fish in the family Rajidae. This bottom-living skate lives in the North and south-eastern Atlantic Ocean in depths ranging from and water temperatures from.

Species description

The thorny skate reaches up to in total length and in weight. Its underside is smooth, but the upper side, as the name suggests, is very rough with many small thorns all over and 13-17 larger ones in line from the back of the head to end of the tail. The top side is brown with possibly black spots and the underside is white. It has a hard, roughly triangular snout and a tail, which is shorter than its body. It eats crustaceans, small fishes, and worms. It produces egg capsules, which are 3.4-8.9 cm long and 2.3-6.8 cm wide, which hatch outside the body.

Conservation status

Thorny skate are taken as bycatch in some fisheries. It is a U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service , which are those species about which the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, , has some concerns regarding status and threats, but for which insufficient information is available to indicate a need to list the species under the U.S. .