Manta Madness: Predator and Prey

The Wikipedia entry for Manta Rays makes the following observation:

“Historically, mantas were feared for their size and power. Sailors believed that they ate fish and could sink boats by pulling on the anchors. This attitude changed around 1978 when divers around the Gulf of California found them to be placid and that they could interact with the animals.”

The mid-20^th century popular culture played to these fears among scuba and fanned the imagination of the pulp-magazine reading public, much in the same way giant octopuses had for an earlier generation of hard had divers.  The manta and devil fish seem dark and foreboding, triggering all kinds of primal fears and exaggerated consequences from an encounter.  As shown in the pulp cover original I call “Double Trouble,” the diver faces an oncoming manta with only a knife while the giant clam keeps him from moving.  Successfully “counting coup” with the manta will make for a tale of courage and bravery around the bar of the campfire.  If unsuccessful in facing the manta or escaping the death grip of the giant clam, his friends will wonder why he never came back from the dive. 

Double Trouble

The Rugged Action cover conjures visions of single warrior combat, man versus nature, where the outcome determines life and death for the protagonist of the antagonist (diver and manta, respectively, at least from the illustrator’s point of view).  In other aspects, as shown in the cover story “we speared the giant manta” authors portrayed the encounter as a sporting hunt against a large and worthy opponent.  The great white hunter transported under water.

Rugged Action

We Speared the Giant Manta

The poster and book cover for Hans Hass’ 1951 movie, Under the Red Sea, shows aspects of the dangerous encounter narrative.  A camera replaces the knife or spear, but the elements of the dangerous encounter, the diminutive size of the human, outnumbered 2 to 1, in the gaze of the manta’s friendly malevolent eyes, kind of a desert after a fish dinner.   Hass used these images for dramatic effect.  As his New York Times obituary of July 3, 2013 noted,

"Hans Hass, a marine biologist and underwater filmmaker from landlocked Austria who was among the first to introduce worldwide audiences to the beauties of coral reefs, stingrays, octopuses and sharks — especially sharks, which he considered the most beautiful and most maligned ocean creatures…For dramatic effect, the climax of many of the films involved a close encounter…" 

Hass often cast sharks in the climactic role.  For others, mantas played the part exceptionally well.

The first time I went spearfishing at Anacapa Island, shortly after being certified in 1984, with my dive buddy Mark, we each carried a six-foot yellow fiberglass "Hawaiian sling" pole spear with three-prong paralyzer tip.  On our second dive, we encountered a flight of bay rays.  These much smaller cousins of mantas swam by and turned back toward us.  We both instinctively raised our pole spears defensively, despite knowing that the bat ray favored small crustaceans and mollusks, not large neoprene wrapped humans.  Earlier in the dive we encountered the cloud of debris and depressions left by the bat rays as they trenched the seafloor in search of food.  The rays passed by without nary a glance and swam away unimpressed with our defensive display of lethal weaponry. They did not attack, we did not pursue.  No pulp fiction was spawned by the encounter.

Bat ray preparing to excavate a small trench is search of food.  (NOAA photo)

In my encounters with rays of all types since that day, I have been fascinated, not afraid, of the creatures.