A rounded disc of reticulate brown lying in the sand, carrying an electric organ in each wing.
A thick-bodied ray with a disc that is almost circular rather than diamond-shaped, a stout muscular tail carrying two dorsal fins and a broad triangular caudal fin, and small eyes set on top of the head with the spiracles immediately behind them. The colour is a reticulate brown - dark blotches and rings over a paler ground - and it sits half-settled into sand with the disc margin buried and the pattern doing the rest.
The shape is what separates it from everything else on the sand here. A stingray has a whip tail and no caudal fin, and the numbfishes are longer than they are wide with the snout drawn out; this one is a rounded disc with a tail built like a fish’s. The dark kidney-shaped electric organs sit in the disc either side of the head and can sometimes be made out as a pair of shadows under the skin.
The organs are the point of the animal. They are modified muscle, stacked in columns, and they discharge on contact - used to stun prey and again in defence, several times over if the contact continues. It is not an animal that approaches anybody, and the injuries happen to a hand or a knee put down on what looked like sand.
Torpedo rays are a night and low-light animal here, lying up in the sediment through the day and hunting small fish over open ground after dark. Records on these coasts are thin and scattered, which is why the ratings are what they are: this is a fish most guides see a handful of times. The species is left at genus. Several Torpedo occur across the Indo-Pacific, the group is unsettled, and nothing that separates them can be read from a photograph of a buried animal.
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.