A large sandy whipray with a row of thorns down the midline and a very long thin tail, buried on lagoon sand flats.
To about 1.5 m across the disc, plain sandy brown above, with a very long thin tail and a row of thorns along the midline of the back and the tail base. It is separated from the other large Indo-Pacific whiprays on that row of thorns.
It lies buried on sand flats and in lagoons in the Maldives and across the Indo-West Pacific, and it is often accompanied by juvenile jacks and remoras. The venomous barb is well down the tail, and the animal is defensive rather than aggressive; the injuries come from standing on a buried one in the shallows.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.