Torpedo marmorata

During vacation snorkeling I stumbled upon an electric ray. I was perplexed by its odd looks, and the fact that it seemed eerily undisturbed by my pursuit. Which is why I left it alone.

Here’s a pic, and a short clip, taken with a modded GoPro Hero21.

Marbled electric ray

I had some trouble looking it up afterwards, but this nice guide helped me — it seems to be a marbled electric ray2. If I knew they were that common in Croatia, I wouldn’t have gone so close; supposedly they can produce a 200V discharge3, and on youtube you can find clips of fishermen getting shocked 🙂

 

  1. fitted with a mock underwater flat lens, made from a wide (Cedevita) bottle cap and a cheap kids’ diving mask; the aged Hero2, which I bought for the sole purpose of underwater photography, was completely unfit for it, despite having the housing rated for 200m–the original curved lens produced blurry images.

    Here’s a pic of the mod:

    hero2-mod

    [↩]

  2. also, Torpedo marmorata. It must be really common, since it has 8 names in Croatian: drhtulja šarulja, mramorna drhtulja, trn, trnjevača, tresnavka, banjača, pjegava drhtulja, renjok; see here https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drhtulja_%C5%A1arulja [↩]
  3. see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbled_electric_ray  [↩]