Verification of Band Pair Counts on Vertebral Centra of Atlantic Stingrays

Life history information of a fish species is important to determine for fisheries management and for keeping the species at a healthy, stable number. Determining the age of these fish, and how long they typically live is an important aspect of life history. One-way to age a fish species is to use vertebrae and in order to do that different factors need to be determined. Two of these factors are that the larger specimen has larger vertebrae and that all the vertebrae along a column show the same band counts within one specimen. Therefore, these two aspects of the vertebrae for the Atlantic stingray, Dasyatis sabina, were the looked at in this project. Finding out if the band pair counts were the same along the whole column of this species was the focus of this study. This species has only been aged once previously in another study and the band pair counts were not verified clearly making this factor of aging an important one to determine. By taking total length and disc width of the stingray along with the length, height, and width of each vertebra it was determined that the larger specimens had the larger vertebrae. Preliminary data shows that before one year, juvenile Atlantic stingrays show no band pairs and it is the same along the whole common, however after a year different band pair counts were seen within the same specimen along the column.