Manta Ray Populations Have Complex Social Structures

Reef mantas in Indonesia exhibit social preferences and form distinct social groups.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 2 min read

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ABOVE: © Rob Perryman

The paper

R.J.Y. Perryman et al., “Social preferences and network structure in a population of reef manta rays,” Behav Ecol Sociobiol, 73:114, 2019.

Reef mantas (Mobula alfredi) are some of the largest fish in the ocean, but much about their biology, particularly when it comes to their social lives, remains mysterious. Grad student Rob Perryman at Macquarie University in Australia has been trying to fill in the gaps by studying mantas around the reefs of the eastern Indonesian archipelago Raja Ampat, where the rays come to feed and be cleaned by smaller fish.

For Perryman and colleagues’ latest study, the team observed hundreds of mantas at multiple sites between 2013 and 2018. The researchers counted how many times each individual appeared at each site, and noted an association between two rays if they visited the same place at the same time. Focusing on 112 mantas sighted ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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