Dasyatis pastinaca (Linnaeus, 1758)

Ponte, Dário, Barcelos, Luís M. D., Santos, Cristina, Medeiros, João & Barreiros, João P., 2016, Diet of Dasyatis pastinaca and Myliobatis aquila (Myliobatiformes) from the Azores, NE Atlantic, Cybium 40 (3), pp. 209-214 : 212

Dasyatis pastinaca

Despite a low number of sampled stomachs, not representative for an accurate evaluation, this study still allows an overview of the diet of this species. In fact, it is the first one made for the NE Atlantic, and one of the few for this species in the world (see Ismen, 2003; Yeldan et al., 2009).

Our results agree with those from other studies ( Ismen, 2003; Yeldan et al., 2009), that also found crustaceans being the dominant group in the diet of D. pastinaca . In the above author studies, fish came in second, but in our study this group came lastly.

When comparing the mean size (TL) of our reduced sample to the figures obtained by Ismen (2003) and Yeldan et al. (2009), the mean size of our sample, 334.8 mm, is considerably smaller than that reported by these authors (522.5 and 602.5 mm, respectively). This difference is certainly due to the small size of our sampled specimens, probably because they were collected in shallow water, when compared with the ones from those studies. In the above author works, respectively 256 and 346 specimens were available when compared to our small number (23). As said before, stingrays are not actively fished in the Azores and the only specimens available are those that are possible to collect by spearfishing.