Queue the X-files intro music – look what washed up on a beach in New Zealand ...
Local resident Hanna Mary discovered the bizarre-looking remains on a beach near Christchurch last month, and her immediate thought was that the sharp-toothed, spike-covered wash-up was "something alien". Mary's initial shock quickly turned to fascination though, and she mustered up the courage to collect the creature and take it home where she got to work trying to identify it. "I took it all the way home and gave it to a taxidermist next door to see if he knew what it was but he wasn't too sure either," Mary told a local news outlet. "That's why I thought I should reach out and see if anyone else knew what it is.”
Mary uploaded the images to Facebook where they quickly attracted a fair amount of interest. Some commenters took a shot at identifying the mystery creature and guesses ranged from "flying squirrel fish" to "penguin".
So what the heck is this thing? "It's definitely a skate and it's definitely a male," Dr Malcolm Francis, Principal Fisheries Scientist at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), explained to us via email. Narrowing down the specific species will require a closer examination of the actual specimen, but Dr Francis is confident that it is one of two varieties of skates. "In that part of the country there are only two species likely to be found in coastal waters – rough skate, Zearaja (formerly Dipturus) nasuta, and smooth skate, Dipturus innominatus. The former is more abundant, more likely to be in very shallow water and smaller than the latter. So rough skate is the most likely ID, but smooth skate is a remote possibility."
Rough skates are endemic to the New Zealand region of the Southwest Pacific where they forage along the soft, sandy ocean floor for fish, shellfish, crabs, and worms. Like all skates, they are cartilaginous fishes with flat bodies and wing-like pectoral fins. And as for those leg-like structures? Male skates have claspers protruding from their pelvic fins that are used to deliver sperm to females during mating. The more you know ...
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