The Florida Manta Project, a conservation nonprofit founded by marine biologist Jessica Pate, has discovered that hundreds of sicklefin devil rays, a cousin of mantas, call the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico home. Pate and her colleagues published their findings in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom on April 24. Both mantas and devil rays are mobula rays, a genus that includes nine species, almost all of which are endangered due to slow reproductive cycles and susceptibility to injury from boat strikes or entanglement in fishing gear. Pate conducts aerial drone surveys, gathers accounts of citizen sightings, and spends countless hours tagging, tracking, and measuring the creatures to fill knowledge gaps and raise public awareness of manta rays in the western Atlantic.
