The Manta Ray, Part 3

It is not an artificial, human made thing. When I don't remember when this was, but the very first time I heard about cleaning stations in the water for organisms, it made me think, oh, well, they installed a big rotating brush in the water and it draws in the fish because cleaning stations. Again, we'll get into all the

details of this. It is a place where if you know where the cleaning stations are, then you as divers or snorkelers can go there and you have an increased chance of seeing the various organisms that make use of it.

in the water. But seeing these large reef mantis going about their business doing some loops here and there, even it was magical. You just felt absolutely at peace with them.

the world's remaining rays. We discussed some basics of manter ray biology, including their body design, feeding habits, and their tendency to breach the water's surface leaping up in the air.

In part two of this series, we followed up on stories from an older marine biology article that told of mantas and devil rays taking hold of the anchor lines and mooring lines of a boat and dragging the boats out to sea, and we discussed how it seems this can happen and sometimes does actually happen, but it's clearly not intentional on the part of the manta, and we got into some biological reasons that mobulid rays are prone

to getting tangled in loose lines in the water. We also talked about some recommended methods for making mooring lines safer for rays. After that we got into mobulid reproduction, which is really fascinating the way they engage in internal fertilization and viviparity, meaning sort of full body contact, sexual intercourse, and live birth respectively, so making them, as in so many other ways, kind of superficially resembling of mammals, even

though they are fish not mammals. And we also got into the elaborate fitness displays that males go through in these sort of mass chain races before the female finally chooses her mate. And today we're here again to talk about.

which are the largest. So you might remember back to our episode about the gray whale, and like the basic observation that large marine animals often have to deal with sizeable parasite loads, or if not actual parasites, then creatures engaged in some degree of mutualism either way you slice it, large marine organisms tend to attract a fair number of hangers on and they become mobile environments for these various organisms.

less beneficial than we used to think it was. At any rate, it's definitely the case with the manta ray that they have a lot of hangers on and they vary greatly. Mantas have to contend, for instance, with tiny copa pod parasites that get literally everywhere on them. Meanwhile, you also have things like harmless juvenile golden travelerfish which just ride the pressure wave and alongside the creature, and in the same way that sometimes dolphins are seen to

ride along side ships. But as far as I'm to understand, they don't pose any risk or damage to the manta rays. And then they split when they're old enough to fin for themselves, and then you have these sucker plate headed remorras to continue with. And there's sometimes a little harder to.

They're free swimming fish, but they like to hitch a ride, and there are many different species, and yeah, they attach to all sorts of organisms, including manta rays, and indeed they've been known to take up more or less permanent residents, sometimes inside a manta's mouth or hide in other body openings such as gills or the cloeca. They typically feed on the ectoparasites and loose skin flakes and other leavings of an organism. And yeah, it seems to be what's

happening with manta rays. Not every variety of remora that latches onto a manta can keep up with it, can remain with the host, especially as it ventures into deeper waters. Some get displaced, And in general, it seems like the longer a manta hangs out in a shallow reef environment, the more it's liable to attract ramoras. So that's the case I've read with certainly the reef manta over the

oceanic manta. And then it's also the case with mantas hanging out closer to shallow waters due to some particular state of their own life cycle. Now, the book that I keep referring to in these episodes Guide to the Manta and Devil Rays of the World by Stevens, Fernando Dando, and Discaria. In this they point out that scientists often cleanly label this relationship between the remoras and the manta rays as parasitic are arguing there's no real benefit for

the mantis here. For instance, the gill activity going in and out of the gills can result in heavy scarring for example, essentially like mutilating the gills over time. Now, others argue, well, the remorras does seem to do some level of cleaning though they're eating up parasites, you know, dead skin flakes, and this, they would point they point out, would be helpful, especially to the oceanic manta, as it

frequents cleaning stations far less as we'll be discussing. Cleaning stations tend to be you know, in reef environments, and if you're out there in the middle of it, there are fewer of these around. So perhaps the assistance in these cases would balance out the harm at least to

some degree. Maybe it's not. I mean, I don't know how often you really see a fifty to fifty split with these relationships in nature, Like you know, there's there's gonna be you know, all the factors of evolution and behavior or in play here, and it's this is ever the question when we're pondering relationships like this.

You know, they're bringing organisms into their mouth and that can bring in extra creatures as well, So you know, what is a manta to do. Breaching may help, as we discussed, as it may help with other marine organisms. Again, as we just mentioned, they can shake some of their hangers on via their deeper dives. But at the end of the day, they're going to need some help. They can't turn to each other. They don't really have much in the way of you know, limbs. They can't groom

each other in the way that say primates do. So they're going to have to head to the cleaning stations.

of it. Ultimately, were talking about a cleaning symbiosis situation that benefits all of the organisms involved, and it's not unique to mantus. You'll find the scenario throughout the aquatic environment, both in fresh water and saltwater. Fish deal with their individual parasite loads in a variety of ways, but it's

often useful to get some help. These relationships have developed over time in which fish will seek out areas populated by various other organisms that generally we're talking and certainly in marine environments about small reef fishes. Also sometimes some shrimp are involved in this, and there are various examples of this outside of the water as well. For instance, on land, examples such as the crocodile and the Egyptian plover or crocodile bird have been observed since ancient times.

You can find like Herodotus writing.

the show before. Look it up, kids. The oxpecker is a great example from the surface world as well, a bird that feeds exclusively on the bodies of large mammals, though this one is also much discussed in scientific circles because it's definitely a case where there are strong arguments to be made that the oxpecker might not ultimately help the organism that it's landing on all that much, and might be as much of a nuisance in and of

itself in the ocean. To return to the waters, however, you see various fish take advantage of these services, including the parrotfish, which were previously discussed on the show. So you don't have to be a behemoth to benefit from a visit to the various organisms that want to eat your parasites, as well as perhaps some loose, dry skin or rancid flesh around your wounds. In fact, some cleaners

are specialized wound cleaners. But naturally, when you're a large fish riddled with parasites, you know you can't scratch those itches again, so manta rays have to head to these stations, and it seems again, it seems to work for everyone. Small Fish and shrimp can't swim as far or do so safely in search of food, so they'll, you know,

they set up at a cleaning station. Generally this is like a rocky outcropping the edge of a reef or you know, something like that, and here they can just hang out and their meals will be delivered to them because the customers will show up. They will go where the cleaner organisms.

particles out of the mouth. It's really quiet extensive. And then these are generally small organisms that are doing this, so they can target those tiny acto parasites and seek them out all over the host's body in every every crevice yum yum. And so the mantas actually the kind

of queue up for this. If one of the bits of advice that the the the Snorkel guides had for us was was, you know, among all the reasons not to get too close is you also don't want to essentially enter the cleaning station, not because the fish are going to clean you, but because the mantas are going to be like, oh, it's occupied, I can't go in there, Like you're taking up room. It's like you've pulled into the car wash ahead of people who want their car cleaned. What would they do?

various mammals and birds living on his antlers. Now. As discussed before, again, symbiosis is a spectrum and it can shift with either party reaping more of the benefits and in some cases perhaps taking a bit of advantage, at least from the human perspective. So some cleaner species do

seem to agage engage. This is in general in occasional acts that feel more parasitic, like maybe they're you know, they're eating parasites, but maybe they're eating a little body mucus off of the surface of a fish or aquatic creature as well. You know, maybe they're grabbing a little flesh that's less on the rancid side, but you know,

just because they can. So, you know, I guess to answerpomorphize the scenario, there are always going to be some bad actors, maybe some folks who take advantage of the trust in a given scenario. But I think still on the whole, even with the cases, cleaning stations seem to benefit everyone, even if sometimes there's a little advantage taken. Yeah.

with digestion. So we're definitely worse off without it. We need it, but at the same time, it can turn opportunistic and it can harm us if you know, there's something wrong with the immune system or other kinds of conditions come online.

its previous meals, and so forth. So first of all, they frequently defecate at these cleaning stations, makes sense, I mean, with all creatures, and stuff that's defecated is going to include things that are still of interest to various scavenging creatures. They will also cough or vomit, blasting particles like food particles out of their mouth, which cleaners are also going

to be interested in. And Steven said all right that sometimes they blast out massive clumps of undigested zooplankton exoskeletons. I don't have a photograph to refer to, but I just have like a mental image of what this might

look like. And then back to their defication. They'll also invert their intestines up to thirty centimeters or twelve inches out of their cloaca while they're doing it, just to better clean everything out that's feces, but also parasites, presumably indo and ectoparasites, And interestingly enough, their feces i've read

is basical dark red due to all the plankton. So when they do this, if you're in the water with them, and you know, they don't care if you're in the water when they when they do this, they're gonna they're they're gonna let loose as needed. This process has often been misinterpreted by divers as like they don't know what they're looking at. It looks like it might be blood

or something. Maybe they're injured, or in some cases they might think they're about to view a berth, which makes sense when you look at We talked about this video footage in the last episode from an aquarium in Okinawa, Japan, where we see one of the very few recordings of a manta giving birth, and it does like like this initial discharge of particles in the water. I can see where you might confuse the two acts.

a fish when you're in its presence. It has a kind of palpable intelligence and emotionality, a sense of curiosity that we generally only associate with social mammals and maybe sometimes with other strange intelligences like that of an octopus, but certainly not with fish. You'll read about this over and over with these manta experiences. Now, of course, that feeling of being in communion with a higher intelligence, it's just a subjective impression people have. Could be an illusion.

Maybe it's based in some kind of esthetic charisma, something about the way the manta looks, or something about the way it moves. The question would be, is there any objective scientific reason for thinking there's actually something special about the intelligence of the genus mobula compared to other fish. I think the answer is pretty clearly yes.

She studies manterray neurobiology and the paper is called in Cephalization and Brain organization of mobulid rays myleobataforms Elasmo Bronchi with ecological perspectives. This was published in the Open Anatomy Journal in twenty eleven. And so this paper set out to measure the brain size of three different species in

the genus Mobula. It looked at Mobula japanica or the spinetiale devil ray also known as the Japanese devil ray, Mobula Thurstoni or the bent fin devil ray, and Mobula birostras, known at the time this paper was published as Manta birostras. Manta was once treated as a separate genus, but now the mantas are grouped with the rest of the Mobula genus. But anyway, this is the giant oceanic manta ray. This

is the big one, the biggest of them all. So to run through a selection of some of the main findings. First of all, the giant oceanic mantray Biostras has the largest brain of any known fish species. It's just in absolute terms, biggest brain of all the fish. Also, mantas and devil rays not only have large brains in absolute terms, but they have very high brain to body mass ratios.

This is known in anatomy as the encephalization quotion. So a larger brain is not always a sign of greater intelligence, at least when measured along the dimensions of intelligence that we find interesting. Often a large brain in an animal is necessary, especially when the animal is itself large, simply to control movement and nerve feedback for that massive body. So if you have a huge body, you need to control a lot of big muscles all over the place.

You need to get sensory feedback from all over the body, so you need a big brain just to handle all that. It might not necessarily be for the kinds of things we think of when we say the word intelligence, things like problem solving, memory learning, social cognition, that sort of thing. What tends to correlate more often with those kinds of intelligence is having a bigger brain relative to the size

of your body. And even then, the relationship between in civilization, quotient and observed intelligence is not completely linear, but it's a fairly strong relationship in terms of the structure of the brain and the characteristics of the brain tissue. These

rays showed first of all, an enlarged telencephalon. The telencephalon is the four brain, the front part of the brain corresponding to the cerebrum in mammals, and also what the author calls a highly foliated cerebellum, and this means that the cerebellum has a more folded texture, which increases the surface area of the cerebellum and that in turn increases the number of neurons and the density of neurons on

the cerebellum, allowing more connections and thus greater information processing power. And these anatomical features, the larger teleencephalon and the more highly foliated cerebellum are correlated with more complex behavior and cognition in other species. So just looking at their brains and brain tissue, it definitely does look like something special is going on with the mobula rays. Compared to other fish.

You're seeing patterns that you see more with smarter animals across different types of lineages.

difference between the two. The ray's brain just looks absolutely bloated and in gorge, you know, and then the skate's brain is streamlined and by comparison, so you know, even not knowing exactly what sorts of neural tissues you're looking at, you can see like, oh, this thing looks super charge. This one looks oversized compared to a similarly sized organism. Yeah.

and organized feeding behaviors. So remember that chain feeding where they'll go in a line feeding together, or cyclone feeding where they go in a circle. They organize into these patterns to take better advantage of food sources. Also, another example of group coordinated group behavior patterns are when they get into these large mate fitness competitions with potentially dozens

of rays chasing around in these athletic courtship displays. Broadly, the management of complex social relationships and social behaviors is thought to be one of the key drivers of brain

evolution in other species. So when you need to navigate a complex social landscape full of other members of your species and you need to maybe work together and manage relationships like recognizing specific individuals of your species and remembering interactions with them you've had in the past, that is often when evolution starts really putting pressure on you to wise up. That is thought to be a big driver

of brain evolution in other lineages. We've already talked about evidence of mantas working together and engaging in these complex group behaviors, but is there any evidence that they do what I was just saying that they recognize and remember each other as individuals. In effect, do they have time stable social relationships. I went looking for an answer here and I found it seems to be yes, there is

some evidence of that. So I came across a paper by Perryman at All published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology in the year twenty nineteen called Social Preferences and Network Structure and a Population of reef manta rays. Rob very interesting connection for you. In this paper to study the social networks of mobular rays, the authors here collected data on more than five hundred groups of reef manta rays this is the species Mobula alfredi over five

years in raja Ampat in Indonesia. So this may have been in some of the same locations or around some of the same locations you visited.

of friendships or enemy ships between males and females. Between males, they only found kind of weak evidence for short term relationships, so perhaps males are less social with each other on average. The overall social networks were categorized as what they call a dynamic fission fusion society, with differentiated relationships linked to

strong fidelity to cleaning station sites. So this idea of a fission fusion society is one whether it's not like a fixed group that stays together for you know, the duration of these animals lives. They're kind of like these groups that come together for some period of time and then split apart and then can dissolve, and then different groups can kind of reform. It's a more more freeform

kind of social network formation and division. And then in their discussion section, the authors say, quote, our results show that stable, differentiated social relationships lasting over several weeks or months are an important driver of group structures in reef manta rays, which suggests that both familiarity and long term

social relationships are important in structuring their societies. In complex social systems, such capabilities can be essential too, identify partners in reciprocal altruism, to maintain social hierarchies, and to avoid inbreeding.

So those three things are strong biological reasons why it might be useful to remember who another individual of your species is and remember past interactions with them, be able to repay favors back and forth, you know, reciprocal altruism, or remember if they did something mean to you in the past. To avoid inbreeding, of course, and to maintain

kind of dominance relationships. So anyway, it seems yes, the answer is modular rays do seem to be especially social relative to most fish, and social cognition pressures are thought to be a big driver of brain evolution in other vertebrate lineages, so that could be a big factor at play here. We don't know for sure, but that seems like a very plausible explanation for why these animals would

need to have more powerful brains. Any other reasons they might need to have extra brain power, yes, or He gets into some other ideas as well. One is the

need to understand their spatial firement. So mobulids are pelagic fish, and they often inhabit coastal waters, including places like reefs and seamounts and so forth, and Ari says that there may be an evolutionary pressure for them to learn the quote complex spatial organization of these habitats, which I think that would include like creating mental maps of not only the underwater topography of like a reef or a seamount, but I think it would also include dynamic elements across

these maps, like water currents and the presence of other organisms such as prey or predators or especially cleaning mutualists. Another possible explanation for their neurobiology is what Ari calls their active and maneuverable lifestyles. She points out that in other species, high cerebellar foliation, which remember that's the folding of the cerebellum that allows more neuron density there. That is associated with, among other things, maneuverability and strong locomotor abilities,

which Mobula rays absolutely do possess. You know, they're very acrobatic. They can move around a lot, and so their brain structures here could have something to do with their tendency toward acrobatics. Another thing, she points out, I thought this was kind of interesting. It could have something to do

with their wide heads. Some aspects of the large brain and the powerful telencephalon of the manta ray could be related to the fact that they have a broad head similar to the hammerhead shark, which our rites could help with organizing and integrating different kinds of sensory feedback. Now I was confused about that at first. I was like, that doesn't come together for me, Like what's the deal. So I had to look this up to understand it better.

But the idea is like in hammerhead sharks, the wide head and the hammerhead sharks also have an enlarged telencephalon the wide head and the enlarged telencephalon in the brain seem to help give the shark enhanced sensory abilities like electrosensory abilities, vision, and even maybe a more stereoscopic sense of smell, so they can determine the direction that smells

are coming from more easily. So like by spacing out the sensory organs across a wider head, you can sort of increase the resolution you get across multiple different sensory modalities. It's again this is a loose analogy, but it's like, you know, having a bigger camera lens kind of like you're increasing the resolution you can get on things. And so the wide spacing there for chemical sensing or electrosensing and the hammer heads especially or vision and all that

it can help you in a way. And then the strong tellencephalon the big four brain can help you gather and make sense of all that information. That does seem to be the case in hammerhead sharks, and Broadly already says it's possible that similar sensory management could be at play within mobula heads and brains. They also have these big, wide heads that are put the different sensors far apart.

paper here, Ari Write's quote endothermy as. The elevation of body temperature by metabolic heat production represents one of the most significant developments during vertebrate evolution that might be connected to enlarged brain size. Sharks in general are poikilothermic, meaning cold blooded. Their body temperature varies with the environment, but some shark species like Eshuris and Lamna, are homeothermic, and

that in this case it means regionally warm blooded. They can keep blood in certain parts of their body elevated warm as they are able to maintain body temperatures well above ambient temperature of the environment by countercurrent flow of blood at certain places of their body. So countercurrent blood flow is another interesting phenomenon. It works essentially by positioning

the hot pipes right next to the cold pipes. So generally, the blood that is returning to an animal's heart from its extremities through the veins is going to be cold. It goes out there to the edges of the body, it loses heat, and then it has to come back to the heart, so it gets cold and it's coming back cold. Meanwhile, arterial blood leaving the heart and headed for the extremities is comparatively warm. It just came from the warmest part of the body right there in the core.

Countercurrent blood flow places long stretches of arteries right next to long stretches of veins, so that the warm blood coming from the core can warm up the cold blood in the veins before it gets back to the core. And even human bodies actually take advantage of this. In our arms and legs, the veins and arteries tend to be close to each other, sort of next to each other to help warm the cold blood returning from the fingers and toes, and this adaptation helps animals maintain higher

body temperatures in cold environments. But sometimes it's not just positioning major vein and artery pathways next to each other. Sometimes there are dedicated structures in an animal's body that really maximize this artery to vein heat exchange. And one example of a structure like this would be what's called a red mirabulae chronica, which comes from the reading mirabilae comes from the Latin for wonderful net, and then the cranica would be of the skull, the wonderful net of

the skull. This is a sort of dense web of veins and arteries inside the cranial cavity around the brain, which helps regulate the temperature of blood flow around the brain. Ari writes quote among mobulid rays in Mobula terrapacina and Manta birostras. Again, that's now Mobula birostras, a ret mirabulae cranica as a countercurrent heat exchanger has been described around

their brain. Interestingly, the same families are also characterized as large brained elasmo bronchs, in which these unique adaptations might serve to enhance their ability to exploit cooler environments, either deeper water or at higher latitudes, with greater efficiency by slowing the rate of metabolic heat loss to the environment or allowing them a higher activity level. And I thought

this was interesting. So I was reading a little bit more about this in a paper called Cranial endothermy in Mobulid rays Evolutionary and ecological Implications of a thermogenic brain by mc Arostigui in the Journal of Animal Ecology, twenty twenty four. And here the author makes a very interesting

kind of comparison. So Arostigwi writes, quote, whereas early hominids in hot terrestrial environments may have experienced a thermal constraint to evolving larger brain size, cetaceans and mobulids, so like whales and rays here in cold marine waters may have experienced a thermal driver for enlargement of a thermogenic brain. So does that converse relationship make sense to like for human evolution, we want to have a bigger brain, right, bigger brain's great, you can get real smart. But heat

concerns place among other things. Of course, you know, heat concerns place upper limits on our ability to grow bigger brains. Those brains can easily get too hot, which is dangerous to us. For mantas and devil rays, there could be

an opposite direction thermal influence on brain evolution. The cold waters that you want to live in and dive down to make it pay thermally to have a bigger brain with this big mesh of blood vessels and so erostig Wei writes in the abstract quote the potential for brain enlargement to yield the dual outcomes of cranial endothermy and enhanced cognition in mobulids suggests one may be an evolutionary byproduct of selection for the mechanisms underlying the other, and

highlights the need to account for non cognitive functions when translating brain size into cognitive capacity. So I thought that was a fascinating and this is not proven, but it's raising the possibility. What if mantas evolved greater intelligence as an accidental byproduct of growing bigger brains, which and the growing of the bigger brains was mainly driven in the first place by thermal pressure. You want to keep the brain warm when you're going into these cold waters.

it because he's got a big brain. As a result of these these thermal conditions.

But there was one more thing I wanted to mention about mobular ray brains and intelligence, and that is there is there's one famous experiment which showed that manta rays may, depending on your interpretation, pass a well known animal cognition milestone known as the mirror self recognition test. So we've talked about this test on the show before, but if you never heard of it, the most common version goes

like this. You place a mark somewhere on an animal's body, somewhere that they wouldn't be able to see it just by looking directly at themselves, but somewhere they could see with the aid of a mirror. So for a human example, you could imagine putting a spot of dye on the skin, maybe on the front of your throat. So you look in a mirror, you'll see it, but you can't see it by looking down. Yeah, then you give that animal a mirror and you watch what they do. Most animals

do not seem to recognize their reflections as themselves. A lot of animals will just kind of ignore a mirror. Sometimes they react as if it were another an in their space, So they react, you know, maybe they puff up and get aggressive, or they try to interact with it somehow, or they just act confused. A small number of animals, including some of the great apes, some marine mammals like bottlenosed dolphins, I think, maybe orcas, some corvids,

and know the magpie. I believe elephants may have passed the mirror test. They do something different. They will touch their own bodies on the spot with the mark and try to rub it off if they can. Sometimes, because of different animal body plans, you have to organize different sort of equivalents here. But they will see the mark and they will try to mess with it, indicating that they understand the animal they're looking at in the mirror

is the self and not another. That's my own body, and I react by touching the part of my body that I see as modified in the mirror.

animals do appear to recognize that. What about mopular rays, well, there was a paper published in the Journal of Ethology in the year twenty sixteen by same author as before sila Ari but also Dominic P. Dagostino, called contingency checking and self directed behaviors in giant manta rays do elasmo broncs have self awareness, and so the authors set this up in their abstract by saying, quote, manta rays have

a high encevilization quotion. As we already talked about it, Remember large brains compared to their body size, similar to those species that have passed the mirror self recognition test and possessed the largest brain of all fish species. Again, that would be in the mobula of Birostris, the giant oceanic mantray, biggest fish brain. They write quote in this study, mirror exposure experiments were conducted on two captive giant manta

rays to document their response to their mirror image. So this test was different from the standard format than that I just described a minute ago because the authors were not able to do the body mark component of the test, And there are some good reasons for thinking about that. For one, thing like mantas don't have hands, so they can't reach out and tut. There's nothing they have that's prehensile they can use to reach out and touch a

part of their body to mess with it. So it didn't have that important body mark component of the test. That places some major limits on how to interpret these results when compared to the results of many other mirror test experiments. But the authors did document the manta's behavior in response to the presence of a mirror, and then they controlled for that by just putting in a non reflective white board of the same size in their tank,

and the results were really interesting. The mantas showed a lot of interest in the mirror like a lot of interest. They really were attracted to the mirror and they wanted to hang out around it. They spent a lot of time moving around in front of it and messing with it. They did not, on the other hand, attempt to interact

socially with the mirror image. And the authors could measure this because there are certain kinds of physiological responses that mantas tend to show when in the presence of another another manta, like they might show like a kind of widening of spots, or like something kind of like changes on their coloration patterns, and they didn't observe anything like that.

They did not see the behaviors you would normally see when a manta sees another of its species, so there were no signs that they thought of this as another animal. The author is right quote frequent, unusual and repetitive movements in front of the mirror suggested contingency checking. In addition, unusual self directed behaviors could be identified when the manta rays were exposed to the mirror. So what exactly do

they mean by contingency checking. This seems to mean testing to see if the mirror image does the same things you do so you know, you might think of making faces in a mirror or like wiggling repetitively in front of a mirror, and they the arch yes, yeah, exactly, yeah,

they were doing that. So exam they observed were things like positioning the body to stare into the mirror and then repeatedly wiggling the cephalic fins, like opening and closing the cephalic fins over and over, blowing bubbles into the mirror. And then also what about these unusual quote self directed behaviors.

This is what look to the researchers like the manta trying to investigate parts of its own body that it can't normally see, like orienting so that it could look at the reflection of its ventral surface of its belly or part of its back for example. They note that quote body turns into a vertical direction, exposing the ventral side of the body to the mirror while visually oriented to it was something that they only ever saw the mantas do when the mirror was in the tank. So

they take the mirror out. They don't see the mantas doing like orienting vertically like this and look, so it's like it looked to them like they were trying to see parts of their body that were not ever visible to them otherwise. So at the end of their abstract, they say, quote, the present study shows evidence for behavioral responses to a mirror that are prerequisite for a prerequisite of self awareness, and which has been used to confirm

self recognition in apes. But again the authors do acknowledge the limitations. You know, this doesn't necessarily prove self awareness this version of the test. Of course, it did not include the mark checking component, and there are multiple ways you could interpret their behavior in front of the mirror. It's possible they didn't recognize it as themselves and we're

just reacting with curiosity to something visually unusual. Though, the behaviors that look like, you know, checking out your belly flesh only when the mirror is around, that does sound pretty interesting to me.

a species like this, then all the better. On the other hand, like just the idea of let's go ahead and assume for the sake of argument that the manta does recognize the reflection as itself. What is that like for a cret Now granted, this is an aquarium scenario, so with the glass involved, there may be some other scenarios. But imagine a purely wild manta that has, as far as I'm imagining, it never encountered a reflection of itself, and then it is presented with one. What would that

be like? What would that be like for a human being? If we managed to make it to adulthood without ever encountering an unnatural mirror, reflection or something like it, say, on the surface of water. I mean, I have no doubt that we'd be able to pass it. I mean, that's certainly part of the human mental capabilities. But but man, what would that what would that encounter be like?

proprioceptive awareness of their own body. Again, I'm not sure of that, but that's it seems plausible.

images of this one. So these individuals you tend to stand out. But as we've discussed, their wounds tend to heal rapidly, you know, maybe not completely, and certainly in the case of severe injuries, not completely, but on the whole, these are changing markers. What doesn't change, however, are the dark spots on their bellies, on their ventral side. You can look up, you know, images of this, and if you've been in the water you might get to observe

this as well. But yeah, you look at the ventral side of a manta and it is a unique fingerprint, the array of spots and blotches on their generally white bellies.

It is, It is a fingerprint. It can be used to i D a particular manta, and scientists are able to put these into a database and track individuals without the aid of actual physical tracks or tax And it gets even cooler because you get into like a citizen scientist scenario here because you have the global ID the Manta Photo database, which via this database, anyone who swims

in proximity to mantas. Again, I'm assuming by following all the rules, but if you manage to get a photos, particularly of their spots, they can I think other parts of the manta can also prove useful, but especially their spots. They can be uploaded into the database and this can be used to help study their movements and their behavior. And yeah, you can learn more about this at Manta

Trust dot org. I believe we've referred to the Manta Trust already, and I'd say, in general, if you've been moved at all by anything we've discussed in these episodes about the manta, the plight of the manta, or the majesty of these creatures, visit Manta Trust dot org. You can learn more about them, you can sign up for their newsletter. You can support their work via donations and purchases.

In fact, that book that I've been referring to, Guide to the Manta and Devil Rays of the World, is available to purchase there, and even if you don't purchase it directly from them, royalties from that book go to the Manta Trust. You can even this is this is super cool. You can of course adopt a manta. This is not uncommon. You can, you know, and but you can also pay to name a specific Maldives manta in their database. I was looking at this on their website.

I think they had like four up for grabs. So these are mantas that have you know, like a technical tag, like you know, string of numbers and letters, but they don't have a fun name yet. And for a very reasonable donation, you can provide a name for such a Manta Ray.