Description
About this project Why Stingrays: Stingrays (Family Dasyatidae) make up a significant portion of fish biomass in coastal and nearshore environments and are ubiquitous to tropical marine ecosystems. They provide essential ecosystem services and in some environments may be considered a keystone species. Despite their importance in tropical marine ecosystems, very few data are available on even the most basic life-hist http://ceibahamas.org The Caribbean whiptail stingray (Himantura schmardae) is a very large, ovate, grey stingray found throughout The Caribbean from northern South America to Florida, yet reports from The Bahamas are rare and largely anecdotal with just one published report from 1968. The Cape Eleuthera Institute's Stingray Research Initiative recently identified several sub-populations of this species and has since attracted funding to make a more comprehensive assessment of its biology and ecology. This research will focus mainly on the genetic conenctivity of these sub-populations and how the fragmented nature of the The Bahamas acts as barriers to gene flow, considering this is a live bearing species. The Project: The main objective of 'Where are all the Whiptail Rays?' is to create an awarenss of this species in The Bahamas, and provide a hub for citizen scientists to contribute to our knowledge of this species' whereabouts. Specifically we would like to know: Location, time and date of any observations Habitat type i.e. off shore coral reef, mangrove creek, estuary etc. Individual sighting or agregations of several individuals Sex (where possible) Photographs of animals Presence of external dart tag on left hand side Approximate size of the animal's disc width - how wide across What makes a whiptail stingray? Caribbean whiptail rays are easily identifiable by several key factors: Round or ovate shaped rather than diamond shaped Light to dark grey Very thick, muscular tail Small eyes No skin fold on tail Not to be confused with the southern stingray which is dark, diamond shaped and has a skin fold on its tail; the Caribbean whiptail is very distinguisable. Sex is identified via the presence or absence of two penises, or claspers that proturude from benenath the base of the tail in males. Conservation Benefits: Anthropgenic incursion to coastal habitats throughout The Caribbean has led to degradation and in some cases destruction of environments considered critical in the life history of many species considered important, either ecologically or commercialy. Gathering these types of data will allow us to promote the conservation value of certain habitats and ecosystems where these animals are found. Stingrays are excellent tools with which to demonstrate the importance of conservation and management frameworks to be applied to the habiats within which they are found. Please contact Dr. Owen R. O'Shea at The Cape Eleuthera Institute in The Bahamas for further information: owenoshea@ceibahamas.orgopen_in_new Stingrays are largely under-represented in scienctific as well as popular literature and your contribution here, will allow much needed data to promote their conservation value, and the ecosytems that support them. Thank you!
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 59 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is The Community Environmental Health Laboratory at MDI Biological Laboratory. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 0bf20513-49a0-4247-a014-c6356780d198. The Community Environmental Health Laboratory at MDI Biological Laboratory publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Occurrence
Contacts
- Originator
- Project Administrator
http://orcid.org/https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2052-5018
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Associate Professor of Environmental Health
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Systems Developer
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Community Manager
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- User ●
- Point Of Contact
- Community Environmental Health Laboratory Manager
- Point Of Contact
- Community Environmental Health Laboratory
Geographic Coverage
Bahamas
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [23.445, -76.825], North East [24.903, -75.835] |
|---|
Taxonomic Coverage
No Description available
| Species | Himantura schmardae |
|---|
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 2015-01-14 / 2016-05-01 |
|---|
Project Data
Anecdata is a free online citizen science platform developed by the Community Lab at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Anecdata is used by hundreds of individuals and organizations to gather and access citizen science observations and provides a platform to easily collect, manage, and share their citizen science data. How Anecdata works: Project managers create projects, creating datasheets that participants fill out to share their observations. Participants join projects and use the Anecdata website or mobile app to share their observations with the project. Project data is now available for anyone to view and download!
| Title | Anecdata.org |
|---|---|
| Identifier | Anecdata.org |
The personnel involved in the project:
- Principal Investigator
- Curator
Sampling Methods
The Caribbean whiptail stingray (Himantura schmardae) is a very large, ovate, grey stingray found throughout The Caribbean from northern South America to Florida, yet reports from The Bahamas are rare and largely anecdotal with just one published report from 1968. The Cape Eleuthera Institute's Stingray Research Initiative recently identified several sub-populations of this species and has since attracted funding to make a more comprehensive assessment of its biology and ecology. This research will focus mainly on the genetic conenctivity of these sub-populations and how the fragmented nature of the The Bahamas acts as barriers to gene flow, considering this is a live bearing species. The Project: The main objective of 'Where are all the Whiptail Rays?' is to create an awarenss of this species in The Bahamas, and provide a hub for citizen scientists to contribute to our knowledge of this species' whereabouts. Specifically we would like to know: Location, time and date of any observations Habitat type i.e. off shore coral reef, mangrove creek, estuary etc. Individual sighting or agregations of several individuals Sex (where possible) Photographs of animals Presence of external dart tag on left hand side Approximate size of the animal's disc width - how wide across
| Study Extent | Why Stingrays: Stingrays (Family Dasyatidae) make up a significant portion of fish biomass in coastal and nearshore environments and are ubiquitous to tropical marine ecosystems. They provide essential ecosystem services and in some environments may be considered a keystone species. Despite their importance in tropical marine ecosystems, very few data are available on even the most basic life-hist http://ceibahamas.org |
|---|
Method step description:
- The Caribbean whiptail stingray (Himantura schmardae) is a very large, ovate, grey stingray found throughout The Caribbean from northern South America to Florida, yet reports from The Bahamas are rare and largely anecdotal with just one published report from 1968. The Cape Eleuthera Institute's Stingray Research Initiative recently identified several sub-populations of this species and has since attracted funding to make a more comprehensive assessment of its biology and ecology. This research will focus mainly on the genetic conenctivity of these sub-populations and how the fragmented nature of the The Bahamas acts as barriers to gene flow, considering this is a live bearing species. The Project: The main objective of 'Where are all the Whiptail Rays?' is to create an awarenss of this species in The Bahamas, and provide a hub for citizen scientists to contribute to our knowledge of this species' whereabouts. Specifically we would like to know: Location, time and date of any observations Habitat type i.e. off shore coral reef, mangrove creek, estuary etc. Individual sighting or agregations of several individuals Sex (where possible) Photographs of animals Presence of external dart tag on left hand side Approximate size of the animal's disc width - how wide across What makes a whiptail stingray? Caribbean whiptail rays are easily identifiable by several key factors: Round or ovate shaped rather than diamond shaped Light to dark grey Very thick, muscular tail Small eyes No skin fold on tail Not to be confused with the southern stingray which is dark, diamond shaped and has a skin fold on its tail; the Caribbean whiptail is very distinguisable. Sex is identified via the presence or absence of two penises, or claspers that proturude from benenath the base of the tail in males. Conservation Benefits: Anthropgenic incursion to coastal habitats throughout The Caribbean has led to degradation and in some cases destruction of environments considered critical in the life history of many species considered important, either ecologically or commercialy. Gathering these types of data will allow us to promote the conservation value of certain habitats and ecosystems where these animals are found. Stingrays are excellent tools with which to demonstrate the importance of conservation and management frameworks to be applied to the habiats within which they are found. Please contact Dr. Owen R. O'Shea at The Cape Eleuthera Institute in The Bahamas for further information: owenoshea@ceibahamas.orgopen_in_new Stingrays are largely under-represented in scienctific as well as popular literature and your contribution here, will allow much needed data to promote their conservation value, and the ecosytems that support them. Thank you!
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 0bf20513-49a0-4247-a014-c6356780d198 |
|---|---|
| https://doi.org/10.15468/un3wer | |
| https://bison.usgs.gov/ipt/resource?r=whiptail |