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 ...
