Reef of rays awaits divers at Innahura Maldives
11 Aug 2019The great diving at Innahura Maldives continues, since opening in early in 2019, the team at Prodivers have found a reef full of turtles, a channel full of sharks and now a reef with lots of rays!
The dive site, aptly named Madi Faru South, where ‘Madi’ means ‘ray’ and ‘Faru’ means ‘long reef’, is just 15 minutes away from Innahura by boat. The top reef lies at 5 meters and slopes gently down to a sandy bottom at 30 meters and it’s here that divers can find a lot of stingrays including black-spotted rays, mangrove rays and feather-tail rays. In the area called ‘Little Bay’ there are very often eagle rays playfully flying around and a good chance of Mobula rays too.
10 Fun facts about rays:
- Rays are closely related to sharks and have no bones in their body – their skeleton is made up of flexible cartilage
- Rays are ovoviviparous, meaning the young are hatched from eggs that are held within the body
- Stingrays tend to half bury themselves in the sand looking for food
- Both stingrays and eagle rays protect themselves with venomous spines or barbs in their tail
- Stingrays feed on crustaceans, small fish, snails, clams, shrimp and other small creatures
- Eagle rays tend to prey on shrimps, octopus, small fish and clams
- Mobula rays are filter feeders – they strain plankton out of the water
- Mobula rays are sometimes called flying rays, thanks to their acrobatic leaping. But scientists are not sure exactly why they do it, it could be communication, courtship rituals, escaping from predators and removing parasites
- Eagle rays are fast swimmers, which also makes them efficient hunters
- Fossil records date rays back to the Jurassic period, 150 million years ago
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- Photo by Stuart Philpott
