The Atlantic manta ray, long thought to be part of a wider species of elusive giant rays but reclassified just this summer as one that nurses its pups off Florida’s coast, holds another secret: its mighty wings provide a lasting habitat for a host of other sea creatures.
According to a new study and hundreds of videos shot mostly near Palm Beach County, the rays can act as a mobile home, providing food, shelter, even honeymoon suites for fish in sometimes inhospitable waters.
“Historically that’s been thought to be a very kind of temporary relationship. We see a fish just kind of randomly swimming with a manta ray,” said researcher and lead author Emily Yeager, a doctoral candidate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School. But the decade-long dataset allowed the researchers to observe much more stable unions…