Meet the Maugean skate, resident of Tasmania
The Maugean skate is one of the rarest marine fish species on Earth. Skates are cartilaginous fish, meaning that their skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone. Sharks, rays, and skates are all cartilaginous fish.
Maugean skates live only in one place, Macquarie Harbour, an estuarine area off the coast of Tasmania in Australia. An estuary is an ecosystem formed where a river runs into the ocean. Estuaries have a mixture of saltwater and freshwater, called brackish water. The Maugean skate is one of the only known skate species that lives in brackish water.
Captive breeding program aims to help this endangered species
Because it only lives in one place, the Maugean skate is especially vulnerable to becoming endangered if there are problems in its habitat. Unfortunately this is exactly what has happened. Maugean skates face pressures from coastal development, hydropower operations, ecotourism activities, and salmon farming, which degrade water quality. The species is on the IUCN Red List, the globally recognized list of endangered species. There are possibly only 1000 Maugean skates remaining.
In September 2023, the Australian government set up a captive-breeding program to create “an insurance population.” An insurance population is a captive population of a species that is meant to ensure that the species remains alive while conservationists try to stop its decline in the wild. As part of this program, scientists at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) collected four adult Maugean skates and 50 eggs from the wild in December 2023, and moved them to a captive facility.
More than half of the wild-collected eggs have hatched, producing healthy babies. One of the female adult skates has laid more than 100 eggs in captivity.
Maugean skate eggs take about seven months to hatch. On July 10, 2024 the first healthy baby Maugean skate hatched from an egg laid in captivity, not one collected from the wild. Researchers say they expect more babies to emerge soon.
The hatching of a baby Maugean skate from a captive-born egg is good news for the species. However, the success of the Maugean captive-breeding program depends on addressing the threats to the skates in the wild. Lawrence Chlebeck, a researcher working on the Maugean skate conservation program explains: “If we’re serious about saving the skate from extinction, we’ve got to give it a home where it can survive in the wild.”
David Brown adapted this story for Mongabay Kids. It is based on an article edited by Shreya Dasgupta and published on Mongabay News.
