Distribution and Habitat
This species has a patchy and discontinuous distribution in Atlantic tropical and warm-temperate waters. In the western Atlantic it is found from Massachusetts, USA to Buenos Aires Province, Argentina; it is rare in the Gulf of Mexico and common in the mouths of tidal creeks along the Virginia coast. In the eastern Atlantic, it is found from Portugal to Ambriz, Angola, including the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Madeira and Canary Islands. It is found in shallow brackish and coastal waters over soft sandy or muddy substrates, at a depth of 5–100 m (16–330 ft). This ray is uncommon overall but can be locally abundant in suitable habitat. Individuals may segregate by sex, with females usually staying in deeper water but moving inshore to breed.
Read more about this topic: Spiny Butterfly Ray
Famous quotes containing the words distribution and/or habitat:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)