Common Stingray - Taxonomy and Phylogeny

Taxonomy and Phylogeny

Well-documented since classical antiquity, the common stingray was known as trygon (τρυγών) to the ancient Greeks and as pastinaca to the ancient Romans. An old common name for this species, used in Great Britain since at least the 18th century, is "fire-flare" or "fiery-flare", which may refer to the reddish color of its meat.

The first formal scientific description of the common stingray, as Raja pastinaca, was authored by the father of taxonomy Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 tenth edition of Systema Naturae. It has since been placed in the genus Dasyatis. There are at least 25 earlier references to this ray in literature, under various non-binomial names such as Raja corpore glabro, aculeo longo anterius serrato in cauda apterygia, Pastinaca marina prima, and Pastinaca marina lævis. Many of these early accounts, including Linnaeus', also incorporated information from other species. Consequently, the designation of a lectotype is warranted in the interests of taxonomic stability, but this has yet to be enacted.

The blue stingray (Dasyatis chrysonota) of southern Africa has long been regarded as a variant of the common stingray. However, the common stingray lacks the blue markings of the other species and differs in morphological and meristic characters, which led the latter to be definitively recognized as a separate species by Paul Cowley and Leonard Compagno in 1993. The distinction between this species and the similar Tortonese's stingray (D. tortonesei) of the Mediterranean is poorly understood and may not be valid, requiring further investigation.

In 2001, Lisa Rosenberger published a phylogenetic analysis of 14 Dasyatis species, based on morphology. The common stingray was reported to be the most basal member of the genus, other than the bluespotted stingray (D. kuhlii) and pelagic stingray (D. violacea). However, D. violacea has generally been recognized as belonging to its own genus Pteroplatytrygon, and recently D. kuhlii has also been placed in a different genus, Neotrygon.