Skates on Ice New Species Found in BC Waters By Gavin Hanke, Curator of Vertebrate Zoology
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n a country where hockey news dominates, you might think that a phrase like “skates on ice” referred to the game. Sorry, Canada. My skates are the fishy variety—and they usually arrive frozen. Most people have heard of stingrays and manta rays, but skates are the underdogs of the cartilaginous fishes. A skate has the general shape of a stingray, but instead of a single barbed spine on the tail, skates are festooned with nasty thorns. Skate thorns are enlarged scales, and they can cut through your skin like a hot knife through butter.
Dots on this drawing highlight the thorns over a skate’s body: orbital thornletts (red), nuchals (green), suprascapulars (dark blue), scapulars (orange), mid-dorsals (pale blue), malars (yellow, males only) and alars (magenta, males only). The number and placement of thorns help us identify skates. In many species, the belly is smooth. Trawlers like the retired CCGS W.E. Ricker are the only way we can collect deep-sea skates effectively. In 2005, a skate was caught in BC with fine scales all over its belly. This skate, originally identified as Bathyraja abyssicola (the deepsea skate), had DNA suggesting similarity to Bathyraja spinicauda (the spinytail skate) from the Atlantic. Clearly more study was needed—but I put it off for years. Who wants to work on an oily, slippery, coffee-table-sized fish that can lacerate you better than a well-wielded cat-o-nine-tails, even while dead?
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What’s inSight
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