Cownose Ray

The name comes straight from its face. Unlike most rays, which have a smoothly pointed or rounded snout in front of the mouth, the cownose ray has a distinct, fleshy, bilobed projection with a deep central notch, positioned above and separate from the actual mouth, that resembles the blunt, split-look muzzle of a cow when seen from the front or below. This structure is not used for feeding directly; it is a specialised sensory and digging tool that the ray uses to probe and fan sediment, locating and exposing the buried clams and oysters that make up most of its diet before it repositions to bite them with the mouth and flat crushing teeth just behind the snout.

Large schools, sometimes reported in the thousands, appear to serve several purposes at once. Moving and feeding in a group may reduce the individual risk of predation by sharks, since a predator has more targets to track and each single ray is less likely to be singled out. Schooling also probably helps rays locate rich shellfish beds and travel efficiently along the coast during the seasonal north-south migrations that track water temperature. The dramatic aerial views of these schools, a shifting dark mass moving just under or breaking the surface, have made cownose ray migrations a notable wildlife spectacle along parts of the US Atlantic coast.

Cownose rays are not aggressive and, like other stingrays, use the venomous tail spine defensively rather than to attack, so injuries to people are rare and normally the result of someone stepping on a ray buried in the sand. There was, however, a well-documented episode of a very different kind of harm to the species — in the mid-2000s a narrative spread, without solid scientific support, that booming cownose ray populations were single-handedly destroying commercial shellfish beds on the US East Coast, and this led to organised "ray roundups" and cownose ray culling and fishing derbies in some areas, along with attempts to promote it as a food fish. Later research questioned both the size of the ray population increase and its role in shellfish declines, and conservationists now consider the species overfished and vulnerable rather than a pest in need of control.

Large visible schools can give a false impression of abundance and resilience. Cownose rays are slow to reproduce, typically bearing only a single pup after a roughly year-long pregnancy, which means a population can absorb only limited additional mortality before it starts to decline, no matter how many individuals are seen together at any one time. They are also caught as bycatch in nets and trawls set for other species, and, as described above, were deliberately targeted in some fisheries and cull programmes based on the mistaken belief that they were a major threat to shellfish. The combination of slow reproduction and multiple sources of fishing mortality is why the species is assessed as Vulnerable despite still forming impressive migratory aggregations.