Turtle Journal

Torpedo Ray (Torpedo nobiliana) in Sandwich, Cape Cod

The string of rarities continues unabated on Cape Cod.  The Turtle Journal team saw its first torpedo ray two days ago in Wellfleet Bay.  We heard from Bob Prescott, director of Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, that it was “the second one so far this fall.”  Okay, two unusual sightings could be a coincidence.  Today, though, we received a call from the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay where Don serves on the board of trustees.  A resident of East Sandwich asked for the center’s help in identifying a fish that had washed up on his beach.  “The animal looks like a skate, but it has a fish tail, not a spike.  It’s big and heavy, maybe 50 pounds.”  We asked him about the color.  “Sort of brownish,” he replied.  We suggested that he click on Turtle Journal to see the current posting on the torpedo ray.  He called us back within a few minutes.  “I’ve got a torpedo ray.  Not as big as that one, but it’s a torpedo ray!”  We promised to check out his ray to confirm the identification, to take documentary photographs and to collect scientific data as soon as we completed our necropsy on the Wellfleet creature.

Google Locations of Two Female Torpedo Rays

Thanks to the return of Eastern Standard Time, the sun was already setting as we reached the Sandwich beach.  The resident had obligingly lugged the animal above the high water mark after our phone conversation, so that it would not disappear with the tide.  He, his children, several neighbors and visitors came down to the beach to observe the analysis.  The fish was indeed a torpedo ray about a foot and a half shorter, a foot slimmer and half as massive as its Wellfleet cousin.  This ray was a bit riper, too, desiccated from a longer period of exposure to the elements.

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Female Torpedo Ray in Evening Surf at Sandwich Beach

We identified the animal as female, the same as the Wellfleet ray, and again we detected no obvious external sign of injury that would reveal her cause of death.  Don employed the “stress on the back” methodology for weight assessment when he flipped the creature over to examine its ventral (bottom) surface.  We estimate her weight a little north of 50 pounds … about half as massive as the Wellfleet ray, but we didn’t compensate for loss of mass due to desiccation.

Don Lewis Measures Width of Torpedo Ray

The curved length of the fish measured from snout to trailing edge of caudal fin was three feet eleven inches.  Its width along the dorsal (top) side of the pectoral fins was two feet five inches.

Don Lewis Measures Length of Torpedo Ray’s Caudal Fin

We measured the length of the caudal fin as eighteen inches and its height as seven and a half inches.  The width across the pelvic fins registered fifteen inches.

Fun fact:  The word “torpedo” actually comes from the Latin derived Torpediniformes for the order of electric rays, which in turn comes from the Latin “torpere” (to stun), according to Wikipedia.  So, the weapon (torpedo) got its name from the torpedo ray and not vice versa.

Torpedo Ray (Torpedo nobiliana) in Wellfleet Bay

We have uncovered some unusual finds the last few days.  A large blue shark, one of the world’s ten most dangerous, came ashore on the tidal flats of Lieutenant Island.  A rafter of wild turkeys appeared with traffic-stopping effect along the main Outer Cape highway in Eastham.  An exotic ocean sunfish stranded at the end of Shirttail Point in Wellfleet Harbor.  And harbor seals seem to have moved in for the fall season.

You might expect that we would be getting used to running into rare specimens.  Maybe so, but we were still shocked … thankfully only figuratively … when we ran into a large, female torpedo ray floating off the Wellfleet town landing at Burton Baker Beach.  Yes, Virginia, about a mile north of the blue shark.  For those who may not be familiar with the torpedo ray, a group within which Don blissfully counted himself until today, this fish is an electric ray that can deliver a 220 volt charge in a short duration burst.  (ASIDE:  If Don actually had known about torpedo rays and that this strange looking creature was a torpedo ray, he wonders if he would have waded into the water to determine what it was and whether it was alive or dead … even with his pseudo-rubber boots.)

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Sue Wieber Nourse Measures FemaleTorpedo Ray 

The torpedo ray is a cartilaginous fish … like sharks and skates.  Its shape is a round, flat disk with a relatively short, large caudal fin that has two dorsal fins.  While this ray can reach 6 feet long and 200 pounds, most torpedo rays taken from the Atlantic fall in the 75 pound range.  It does not have spines or thorns that are characteristic of common skates.  Small eyes are set forward and this ray’s color is brownish or purplish on the dorsal (top) surface and white on the ventral (bottom) side.

Brownish Color; Short, Large Caudal Fin with Two Dorsal Fins

Habitat for the nocturnal torpedo ray is benthic (bottom of the sea) where it buries itself in the sand during the day.  While described as pelagic, torpedo rays can be found mostly along the continental shelf in water from 10 to 350 meters deep.  They are not common in inshore waters.  This fish is the only electric ray that is found in the northwest Atlantic Ocean and historic records document torpedo rays in Vineyard Sound, Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay, especially the Provincetown area.

Female Torpedo Ray with Pelvic Fins & No Claspers

This specimen was identified as a female with pelvic fins and no claspers.  Factoid: Torpedo ray females bear live young.

Pectoral Fins Guide Stunned Food To Its Protruding Mouth

The torpedo ray has two kidney-shaped electrical organs that make up 20% of its weight and are located on the pectoral fins.  They generate a power equivalent to 220 volts that stuns prey with a burst of electric current.  Its prey includes flounder, silver hake fish, small sharks such as dogfish, eels, worms and crustaceans.  After stunning its prey, the torpedo ray guides food with its pectoral fins toward its protruding mouth for ingestion.

Four Feet Six Inches From Snout to Caudal Fin

We measured this specimen along the spine from the tip of its snout to the trailing edge of its caudal fin.  The curved length is four feet six inches.  The maximum width across the pectoral fins (along the dorsal surface) is three feet two inches. 

Caudal Fin Measures One Foot Five Inches Long

The width across her pelvic fins is one foot five inches, the exact same measurement as the length of the caudal fin.  The height of the caudal fin is 11 inches.  We had no scale that could weigh a creature of this size.  So, we used the Don “how much torque does it take to flip this animal” methodology, similar to the technique we employed on the blue shark.  His back estimates that the torpedo ray weighed somewhere south of 100 pounds.

Torpedo rays have no significant commercial value today.  Once upon a time when Southeast Massachusetts was the OPEC of its day, providing the energy that lit the entire world, liver oil of torpedo rays was considerd equal to the best sperm whale oil for illumination.  Some in those days said that torpedo ray oil cured cramps if rubbed externally and stomach ailments when taken internally.  We can attest to the fact that the torpedo ray is one awfully oily fish that we had to wrestle into place to take measurements and captured documentary images.  (You’re right it was muscus and not oil, but the allusion wouldn’t have worked if we had said “slimy” rather than “oily.”  You caught us distorting science to play with words and our only defense is that it’s Guy Fawkes Day, and words are safer to play with than bonfires … and barrels of gunpowder. “Remember, remember, the Fifth of November.”)

Do you remember just a few weeks ago when swimming in Wellfleet Bay seemed like a safe pasttime?  Those were the halcyon days of our innocence.  Remember our friend Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

And, yes, we did vote yesterday.  Hope all our readers did, too.

This week we have witnessed an exotic array of species from a large blue shark to a rafter of wild turkeys.  But when it comes to bizarre, nothing in our corner of the universe matches the ocean sunfish (Mola mola).  It’s the most massive bony fish in the world.  [Yep.  That “bony” adjective excludes sharks (cartilaginous) and, of course, the “fish” category cuts out whales and dolphins (mammals) and giant squid (cephalopods) and even our favorite sea serpent: Nessie.  Doesn’t seem fair.]  Researchers in the Pacific claim that they have documented an ocean sunfish that reached 14 feet (from dorsal fin tip to anal fin tip) and 10 feet long from face to caudal fin, and hit the scales at near 5000 pounds.

Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) – Dorsal Fin Left, Caudal Fin Top, Anal Fin Right

That’s right:  nearly round, flat and awfully heavy … like a millstone and voilà, the Latin word for millstone is “mola.”  Yet, un-millstone like, the ocean sunfish swims lithely through the water not flat like a flounder, but upright with its dorsal fin topside and its anal fin beneath.  As the sunfish cuts through the ocean, its dorsal fin often prompts shouts of “shark” from nervous observers.  Sunfish are also known to bask motionlessly on the surface for thermoregulation (a.k.a., to warm up).

Ocean Sunfish (Caudal Fin Left, Dorsal Fin Bottom, Face Right)

We often see ocean sunfish in the late summer and early fall along the Outer Cape and unfortunately, and for some reason that we can only speculate about, we find several dead, stranded sunfish each year at the beginning of the cold-stunned sea turtle season.  Sunfish inhabit temperate and tropical waters and seem to prefer warmer temperatures, so perhaps they too become cold-stunned during the fall as water temperatures plunge in the Cape Cod region.  Perhaps they, too, seek refuge in shallower, warmer bay waters, only to succumb to the cold as the fall chill deepens.

Bob Prescott, the director of Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, was interviewed by Matthew Belson, New Media Editor of Gatehouse Media New England – Cape Cod Region, recently about ocean sunfish that have turned up in Cape Cod waters.  Bob, as usual, gives an outstanding overview of the sunfish and its natural history.  Click here to listen to Bob’s interview.

Family Examines Ocean Sunfish on Shirttail Point, Wellfleet

Earlier last week a sunfish was spotted swimming erratically in Wellfleet Bay and last Friday an observer reported a dead sunfish by Shirttail Point (the Wellfleet town pier).  On Sunday morning when a necropsy was scheduled, the sunfish had disappeared, dragged off by astronomical tides.  It surfaced again Sunday afternoon as the tide dropped on a sandy spit at the easternmost point of Shirttail Point.  As size goes, this one was smaller than most that we have seen, measuring perhaps 3.5 feet in diameter, excluding dorsal and anal fins.  You can get a good sense of its size in comparison to the tourist family in the picture above.

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Ocean Sunfish

The ocean sunfish is a round, flat fish with a very small, scalloped caudal (rear) fin called a “clavus” (rudder).  It has very pronounced dorsal (top) and anal (bottom) fins, but small, obscure pectoral fins that are rounded and directed upwards.  The eyes and mouth are relatively small, and the protruding mouth contains fused teeth.  The gill slits are covered with an operculum and are found just anterior (forward) of the pectoral fins.  Its scaleless skin is thick and helps to protect the sunfish from stinging barbs of jellyfish, one of its favorite foods.  The sunfish preys on jellyfish, plankton, crustaceans, small fish, squid and sponges.  Its predators include sharks, orcas, and humans that consume Mola mola, especially in the Far East.

 

 Ocean Sunfish (Eye, Operculum Covering Gill Slits, & Pectoral Fin Facing Upward)

Satellite pop-up tags are used by researchers to understand the movement and the migration of ocean sunfish.  They reveal that sunfish stay in the same general geographic area, and that they move up and down the water column many times a day, dropping to 350 meters below the surface to hunt prey.  They appear to get cold at depths, which probably accounts for surface basking.  Sunfish are know to carry a large parasite load and have “cleaning stations” for other fish and seagulls to lend a helping hand.  They also are known to leap from the surface and slap down hard again, maybe to rid the sunfish of pesking parasites … or perhaps merely for sheer exhilaration.

Fun factoid:  As adolescents, ocean sunfish school, but as adults they are solitary animals.

Keeping an Eye on Ocean Sunfish

Request for Your Help 

NEBShark (the New England Basking Shark Project) in collaboration with the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance wants to receive sightings of live and dead basking sharks & ocean sunfish.  You can report a sighting directly on the NEBShark website, www.nebshark.org, and attach digital images of the animal.  Information on these amazing critters, two of the largest fish in the world, is shared with governmental officials and researchers worldwide.  “Krill” (Carol) Carson of NEBShark offers her cell phone number (508-566-0009) for live sightings of animals in distress, so that the sunfish can receive expeditious help.  If the ocean sunfish is dead, Krill and her colleagues would like to conduct a necropsy to determine the cause of death and to collect tissue samples for genetic and scientific analysis.  As you have read before, you can always call our Turtle Journal 24/7 hotline, 508-274-5108, for any distressed critter, for any unusual coastal happening or for information about any wildlife sighting.

Beautiful Rainbow of Fouling Critters

As proven in every crime drama, beauty can be lethally deceptive.  So it is, too, on the docks of Cape Cod and the SouthCoast of Massachusetts.  From a blurry distance as seen through thick estuarine water, fouling communities enwrapping marine structures appear rainbow beautiful.  So different from our youthful memories when docks were adorned with less colorful, but much more productive and edible species, today the waterfront is dominated by exotic critters that are gourmet delicacies only in the avant-gard restaurants of the very, very Far East.

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Fall Fouling Community Visual Survey in Sippican Harbor

A quick visual survey of the fouling community along Tabor Academy’s Hoyt Dock (above) showed a large variety of exotic critters:  tunicates (Botrylloides diagensis) and club tunicates (Styela clava), hydroids (Obelia geniculata), red bearded sponges (Microciona prolifera), worms, crumb of bread sponge (Halidrondria panacea or Halidrondria bowerbanki), and barnacles (Balanus balanoides), among others.

Summer Fouling Community Sample from Sippican Harbor

A sample collected from the same dock in summer shows an even greater variety of species.  We will address many of these species in future posts, especially the exotic and invasive tunicates.  For today’s story, we focus on the Northern Rock Barnacle, a ubiquitous animal within the inter-tidal zone.

Grayish White “Barnacle Zone”

Barnacles inhabit rocky shores, forming a grayish white “barnacle zone.”  They’re found among inter-tidal fouling communities in harbors and protected embayments.  You find them on rocks, docks, piers, pilings, oysters, clams, shells, hermit crabs, whelks and really any hard, permanent surface.  They also live on more mobile surfaces such as boat bottoms, turtles, whales and horseshoe crabs. 

Northern Rock Barnacle (Balanus balanoides)

Let’s start with the confusing stuff.  What we think of as the barnacle isn’t.  The barnacle is actually a shrimp-like, soft bodied animal that stands on its head and extends its six pairs of “feet” (called “cirri”) to catch food like a cast net.  What we think of as the barnacle is the animals “home” and consist of a hard, many plated shell composed of calcium carbonate that is affixed to a hard, permanent substrate with a natural superglue.  This barnacle glue has been researched extensively because it’s extremely strong, sets quickly under water, withstands high pressures, resists both high acidity and alkalinity … and is completely natural.  What baby-boomers wouldn’t give to have barnacle glue for their dentures!

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Northern Rock Barnacles Cast “Feet”-Net to Snare Food

As you can see in the video clip, the top plates of the barnacle’s home open for feeding and the animal, standing on its head, casts out its six pairs of feet (cirri) into the shape of what seems like a cast net to capture food particles.  They consume zooplankton such as copepods and phytoplankton such as diatoms.  When the “net” is drawn back, food is scraped off the cirri into the animal’s mouth.

Barnacles Scraped from Boat Bottom & Scavenged by Seagulls

Those top plates close tightly to seal the soft-bodied animal inside and to protect it from succumbing to desiccation during low tide and from being attacked by predators.  Predators include dogwinkles (dog whelks), seastars, marine worms, fish, and periwinkles that consume small barnacles.  Humans eat large barnacles, scrape them from the bottoms of their boats and docks, and add fouling paint to keep them away.

Fun factoid:  Barnacles are crustacean just like crabs and lobsters, but that still won’t entice us to eat them.

Don Lewis Examines Large Male Blue Shark in Wellfleet Bay

CapeCast: Big, dead blue shark!

On today’s CapeCast: See video of a nearly eleven-foot-long blue shark that washed up on Lieutenant Island in Wellfleet!

CapeCast! from Cape Cod Times on CapeCodonLine.Com