The swimming action of these great rays is very beautiful, displaying all the graceful undulating movements so characteristic of the shark tribe, which go so far towards mitigating the repulsive appearance of some of them. There is always this striking contrast between the live and dead shark; the one, though endowed with instincts that can never commend it to our goodwill, is yet a very lithe and graceful robber; the other, deprived of all life and movement, shows only the vices with none of the redeeming beauty.
A more characteristic pose of the rays, however, is that of lying motionless, or, at most, with its disc slightly undulating with respiration, on the sand just under water. Sometimes, indeed, they are found lying a yard or so above low-water mark in pits of their own making, and it is in such positions that they may be particularly dangerous, through no fault of their own, to the too eager surf-fisherman who wades bare-footed in the muddy water, careless of such risks. The whip rays seem of wide distribution under a variety of names, and a striped species has been taken on the Irish coasts. It would be difficult to know what use the delicate tail--usually stripped bare of its skin an inch from the tip--can be to this fish. The armament of spikes at the base can be erected at will, and the fish is able to bend up its back, much after the fashion of the scorpion, so as to bring them to bear on enemies attacking it in front. Each spike is serrated, its innumerable small points setting inwards, and the whole is enveloped in a skin so thin as to be ruptured by the mere act of withdrawing it from some body into which the fearful weapon has been thrust. My own impression is that portions of this skin remain in the wound, and set up that local poisoning that gives to such an act of aggression the popular name of “stinging.”
There are even larger rays on that coast than the whip ray. The giant ray, for instance, is one of the largest of existing fishes, and specimens have been captured measuring as much as twenty feet across the “wings.” Indeed, the Spanish and half-caste pearl divers call this ghoulish monster the “blanket,” from a fixed belief (though no one can have survived to tell the tale) that it envelops its victims as in a blanket, and then devours them at leisure. This sobriquet survives in the adopted scientific name of Manta. It appears to me that such a diet is against all probability, if we may judge by the food of most of the order, but these men are firmly convinced that the giant ray, or, as it is also not inappropriately called, devil-fish, is an inveterate enemy to man, and they at least earn the right to an opinion on dangers to which they alone are constantly exposed.