The Strangest Fish: Spine-tailed Elipesurus
Imagine, if you will, a circular animal 7 to 8 feet in diameter and flat as a pancake
When it rose from the coffee-colored water of Brazil’s Rio Negro where I was fishing, I gasped. The thing propelled itself not with a tail or fins, but by rippling the edges of its massive disc-shaped body.
At first, I did not recognize it as a fish at all. In fact, I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I’d never seen anything like it.
In a whisper, to avoid frightening it away, I told my fishing companion, Walter Delazari, to look. When he turned and gazed upon it, he, too, gasped. “Mãe de Deus!” he exclaimed, a look of fear on his face. “Mother of God!”
“Que é isso, Walter?” What was it? I asked.
“Hi-ya,” he said, if you write the word the way it was spoken. He spelled it out on a tablet. R-A-Y-A. “Enorme raya.”
The word means ray, as in stingray or manta ray. Only this was no saltwater ray. We were fishing hundreds of miles from the ocean in the jungles of Brazil when we saw it.
Walter has fished rivers and lakes throughout South America, and he told me during four decades of fishing, he’d never seen anything like it. It passed our boat, just a foot or two beneath the surface, then slowly rippled out of sight.
When we returned to our mother ship, the Amazon Castaway, I told people about the unusual creature we saw. “Perhaps the water acted like a magnifying glass and made it look bigger than it really was,” the first mate, a man well-versed in Brazilian ichthyology, told me. “There are several species of freshwater rays in Brazil. They have long tails and stingers, just like stingrays. The natives are terrified of them. They fear them even more than piranhas. But the biggest I’ve ever seen or heard of were only a foot or so across and weighed only a few pounds. If what you saw was really a freshwater ray, it would be the biggest one any man has ever seen.”
The mate’s words would one day soon ring true.
When I returned to the U.S., I intensified my study of freshwater rays. I learned scientists are unsure exactly how many freshwater species exist. The facts are clouded because some marine rays enter rivers and occasionally swim hundreds of miles from the sea. This much is certain: at least 36 ray species worldwide spent all or part of their lives in freshwater. Twenty-five live in South American waters and at least 18 in the waters of Brazil.
In Peru, rumors persist of a giant species known as the coly ray. It is reputed to reach a size of almost 10 feet, but very little is known of it. The giant freshwater stingray of Southeast Asia can exceed 6 feet in width and 16 feet in length, and is known to weigh more than half a ton. It seems, however, this is not a true freshwater species. It lives, at times, in brackish estuaries.
The largest South American freshwater ray I found documented was a discus ray weighing 11.4 pounds. Learning this, I realized my sighting in the Rio Negro might forever be viewed as nothing more than an optical illusion. I knew what I saw, however, and when I returned to the river a year later in December 2000, I set out to catch one of these giants and prove the existence of my mystery fish. Five days before Christmas, I did just that.
While fishing a live piranha bait at the confluence of the Rio Branco and Rio Negro, I hooked an enormous fish. I knew immediately it must be a ray. Unlike the Amazon catfish we were catching, this fish did not race away at high speed or spin in the water. If the catfish were river race horses, this was a Clydesdale. It was plodding yet powerful, towing our bass boat like Moby Dick pulling Ahab’s skiff.
As the battle passed the 20-minute mark, I wondered if my worn-out, 44-year-old body could bear the strain. Each time our guide motored near so I could reel in line, the huge ray surged away, taking yards of line with it. I knew at any time the hook could pull free or the fish could become hopelessly entangled on some underwater obstruction. Finally, however, the beast relented. Thirty-four minutes after our war began, it surfaced—a gigantic fish so unlike any other, it elicited cries of astonishment from us all.
José, our guide, warned us immediately to avoid the short, thrashing tail. There was no stinger evident, but the tail was covered with sharp, bony spikes. If it struck one of us, he said, it could inflict a terrible wound. The traditional first aid treatment is to urinate on the wound, but Amazon folklore says a virgin must pee on the sting to relieve the pain, leading to the joke, “There is good news and bad news … there are no virgins in Brazil.”
The tail of the discus ray caught by the author did not have a long stinger like most known rays, but was covered with small sharp spikes, a characteristic of this little studied species. (Keith Sutton photos)
When finally we had the ray subdued, we measured it. It stretched 6 feet, 2 inches across the disk. It resembled a giant extraterrestrial Frisbee. It was almost perfectly round. The spiked tail seemed tiny and out of proportion to the enormous disk, like the stem on an apple. Dark eyebrow-shaped markings punctuated the brown leathery skin covering the creature’s upper surface. Two tiny eyes erupted from the center of the disk. The creature was pinkish-white beneath, with a mouth big enough to inhale grapefruits.
The ray weighed an incredible 116 pounds, 13 ounces. Unfortunately, it was deeply hooked and died within minutes of its capture. We were unable to release it.
When scientists examined photographs of the fish, it was identified as Paratrygon aiereba, the discus ray. Two Brazilian names—manzana ray and eyebrow ray—are derived from features I observed. Manzana means apple, a reference to the ray’s shape—like the cross-section of an apple with its stem. Eyebrow alludes to the dark eyebrow-shaped markings. Small specimens sometimes are kept by aquarists, but no ichthyologist had ever speculated this species could grow to such enormous proportions. No larger obligate freshwater ray has ever been officially documented.
Frank Schaefer, a ray expert to whom I spoke, told me this fish provided the answer to a long-standing puzzle. R.H. Schomburgk, in The Fishes of Guiana published in 1860, provided a painting of a ray he discovered in 1843. He called it the “Spine-tailed Elipesurus (Elipesurus spinicauda).”
Schomburgk’s painting of the Spine-tailed Elipesurus in The Fishes of Guiana published in 1860.
“This ray was found in the Rio Branco …,” he wrote, “and here it is called Naree-naree; it …was without the horny spine [stinger] which is generally found on this genus … they dig holes in the sand, in which they lie flat, and there await their prey. They are used for food, but are not preferred to others …
“The form is altogether remarkable in the short or deficient tail, an organ among the rays which is generally in one way or other marked by considerable developments,” he continued. “These seem to be here confined to the strong spiny excrescences which cover its base, and are the only organs of defence [sic] with which the animal is furnished.”
No similar ray with the same unusual tail spines had been seen since Schomburgk painted the specimen for his 1860 book, so scientists wondered if it might be just an anomaly—a ray that had lost its stinger due to some sort of mutilation. In 1985, just 15 years before I caught my specimen, Brazilian ichthyologist Ricardo S. Rosa, in a scientific article published in Revista Brasileira de Zoologia (the Brazilian Journal of Zoology), said, “The genus Elipesurus of neotropical freshwater stingrays, and its type species E. spinicauda, are known from a single specimen which lacked a developed tail and caudal sting. No type or similar specimens exist. The original description and illustration are inaccurate, without diagnostic measurements or characters … Therefore, a precise identification of E. spinicauda remains impossible, and both names are considered doubtful. Since all other potamotrygonid stingrays have more or less developed tails and stings, the Elipesurus condition is regarded as a mutilation.”
So, for 140 years, the Spine-tailed Elipesurus remained something of a mystery. No one had ever caught or described one other than Schomburgk, and biologists believed the one he described was a mutilated specimen, not a separate species as Schomburgk speculated. The ray I captured, however, had precisely the same sort of tail spines as Schomburgk’s fish, the same shape and coloration. Using the photos and description I provided, scientists were able to resolve this ichthyological mystery. We now know that Schomburgk’s Elipesurus is a distinctive form of the discus ray, Paratrygon aiereba. And we know that the world’s largest freshwater ray may not swim in the waters of Peru or Thailand as was previously suspected. It swims in the Rio Negro and Rio Branco of Brazil.
The discus ray I landed is currently listed as an all-tackle world record by the International Game Fish Association. Call me crazy, but I believe the ray I caught was smaller than the one I originally saw. I hope someday I can return to the Rio Negro and fish at its confluence with the Rio Branco once again. If so, I will try to prove that the unusual discus ray is, without doubt, the largest of these incredible fishes.