Stingrays found with tails cut off in New Zealand

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Washed Up: Four eagle rays were found on Murrays Bay beach with no tails.

The sight of four eagle rays with their tails cut off has shocked beachgoers at Murrays Bay on Auckland's North Shore.

Kourtney Magasiva was walking her dog on the beach with friends just after 10am on January 14 when she saw the dead rays.

"It's terrible animal cruelty to do that to a perfectly healthy creature of the sea," she said.

Magasiva had never seen anything like it at Murrays Bay before.

"Someone's done it on purpose. I'd hate to think they're still doing it," she said.

Agnes Le Port, formerly part of the University of Auckland's marine team, now works at James Cook University in Australia and has caught stingrays and eagle rays for scientific research.

Le Port understood fishers wanting to protect themselves from the barbs but said a better option was to slice them off while leaving the rest of the tail intact.

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Cruel Practice: All of the eagle rays were dead with their tails cut off.

"Barbs will regrow eventually, so this is a great way of not getting injured while not depriving the ray of a lifetime being defenceless against its natural predators, sharks and orca," she said.

The rays at Murrays Bay were eagle rays rather than stingrays, which were usually the ones with chopped-off tails, Le Port said.

This was the first time she had seen it happen to eagle rays.

"Unfortunately, this is still common practice among both commercial and recreational fishermen who fear injury from the ray barbs," she said.

"I have definitely seen a few which have survived quite well, so I think that in general they are quite hardy to this practice."

University of Auckland Institute of Marine Science associate professor Mark Costello said stingray stabbings were rare and happened only when the stingrays were threatened.

The sting was the rays' only defence, he said.

A Ministry for Primary Industries spokesman said a legal opinion would be required to find out if the practice was an offence under the Animal Welfare Act.

"If the tails are cut off while the rays are alive and then tossed back into the sea to then subsequently die of the injury, this could be an ill-treatment offence," he said.

"It would be similar to the finning of sharks when they are alive and then tossed back into the ocean to drown."

He said it was a tricky area because there was no evidence the rays were alive when the tails were cut off.

"There are many possibilities on what may have happened," he said.

"The rays may have been caught in a set-net and died and had their tails removed to help disentangle them from the net. We just don't know."

He said discarding unwanted fish close to shore was bad practice because it created a nuisance if they come ashore.

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