Rajidae

Thorny skate

Amblyraja radiata

Horned eggs enduring three Barents winters

• Gray
• Pink
• White
• Coastal
• Globally widespread
• Marine fish
• Depressed
• Large

Armed with an intimidating fortress of star-shaped bony thorns across its upper disc, the thorny skate is a cold-adapted demersal batoid traversing the deeper continental shelves of the icy North Atlantic Ocean. Its heavy, heart-shaped disc presents a blunt snout and angular wings, colored in mottled shades of sandy-brown, olive, and grey with faint dark marbling. The defining physical hallmark is a conspicuous midline row of eleven to nineteen immense, radiating star-based thorns marching from behind the eyes to the first dorsal fin on the tail, flanked on the pectoral shoulders by additional thorny bucklers. Ranging throughout subpolar waters from Spitsbergen, Greenland, and the Barents Sea south to the North Sea and the Gulf of Maine, it inhabits mud, sand, and gravel slopes between twenty and one thousand meters depth. A methodical benthic hunter, it searches bottom sediments for polychaetes, amphipods, decapod shrimps, spider crabs, and small groundfishes like capelin and sandeels. Females lay large rectangular egg capsules. Maximum recorded total length attains one hundred and five centimetres.

Sources: NOAA Fisheries — Thorny Skate, Amblyraja radiata