What the devil?
Kelvin Lim, the Curator of Fishes at NUS' Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research gives some insight to the "Manta Ray sighting" off Pulau Hantu on Saturday:
"There are records of manta rays in Singapore, but they are the smaller ones the devil rays - genus Mobula. I don't know of any records of the true one, Manta birostris, from Singapore, but they occur in the Tioman area, and it is possible that they may wander into our waters.
[However], 3 ft would be the size of devil rays. In the mid 1990s, a
school of Mobula thurstoni was trapped in a kelong off Tuas, and
a few were brought to Underwater World. One of them pup in the
aquarium, but all died soon after. We have the pup and one adult
preserved in our collection."
So it is possible to get excited at what looks like what you'd like to see. We cannot determine if what we saw was a Manta or Mobula after Kelvin's comments. The sighting was too brief and we failed to get any visual documentation. Also, as their behaviour (eagle rays also look and swim vaguely like Mantas) is almost similar, we can't tell them apart by those means. Or can we?
None the less, a devil ray sighting would still be very exciting, and the (wishful) notion of having seen a Manta, charming. But, if we keep going out there enough, knowing the oceans... who'd know?
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