Devil Ray

When diving with devil rays, strict discipline and calm breathing are paramount, as sudden movements, excessive finning, or noisy regulator exhaust can instantly spook an entire aggregation. Never attempt to chase, touch, or swim directly above or below schooling rays; instead, hold your depth along drop-offs or seamounts, maintaining neutral buoyancy and letting the animals approach on their own terms. If encountering them in open blue water, avoid surfacing underneath the school, as this breaks their formation. Photographers should utilise ultra-wide-angle or fisheye lenses, setting fast shutter speeds (1/250s or quicker) to freeze swift wing movements. Natural ambient lighting combined with subtle, wide-beam video lights or diffused strobes works best, as harsh direct flash can easily scatter backscatter off particulate-rich waters and frighten the rays.

The best encounters with devil rays depend on the specific hotspot and seasonal plankton blooms. In the Sea of Cortez (Baja California, Mexico), massive aggregations of Spinetail and Pygmy devil rays arrive between April and July, providing world-class encounters. In the Azores, offshore seamounts like Princess Alice Bank see majestic schooling of Chilean devil rays from July to October. Across the Galapagos Islands, oceanic species can be encountered almost year-round, though the calm, warm season from December to May often offers the best visibility for schooling pelagics. In the Maldives, devil rays are frequently spotted alongside mantas at cleaning stations, with optimal conditions spanning November to April in western atolls and May to October in eastern atolls. Planning trips around new or full moons often increases tidal flow, attracting larger schools.

Devil rays inhabit offshore oceanic expanses, pelagic corridors, and dynamic coastal shelf breaks throughout tropical, subtropical, and warm-temperate seas. They occur across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, frequenting depths from the sunlit surface down to over 1,800 metres. While predominantly creatures of the open blue, devil rays regularly visit deep drop-offs, pinnacles, and oceanic seamounts where strong currents create powerful upwellings of nutrient-rich deep water. Key regions include the Sea of Cortez and Revillagigedo Archipelago in Mexico, the volcanic seamounts of the Azores, the offshore waters of the Galapagos Islands, the Cocos Ridge, the Maldives, and the Coral Sea off Australia. They occasionally transit through coastal bays and lagoons when feeding on seasonal plankton blooms.

Devil rays are specialist filter feeders, primarily subsisting on dense concentrations of zooplankton, such as euphausiids (krill), mysids, copepods, and hyperiid amphipods, alongside small schooling pelagic fish like anchovies, sardines, and larval fishes. When feeding, they unfurl their flexible cephalic fins to direct prey-laden water into their mouths as they glide forward. Sophisticated gill rakers act as an intricate sieve, retaining nutritious food particles while expelling excess sea water through the gill slits. Feeding strategies vary from high-speed surface sweeps to coordinated group somersaults and barrel rolls through dense plankton clouds. Many species perform deep crepuscular and nocturnal foraging dives into the mesopelagic zone, tracking the vertical migration of the deep scattering layer before returning to the sun-warmed epipelagic surface waters to bask and thermoregulate.