A ray (or skate) of hope: Tracking the world’s largest skates in the waters off County Cork

Courtmacsherry has an abundance of flapper skates so researchers have headed there to deploy animal tracking technology to learn more about these unusual creatures

Courtmacsherry has an abundance of flapper skates so CETUS Skate Research Project, led by University College Cork and partnered with Inland Fisheries Ireland, aims by 2025 to collate existing data on these animals and generate new data using animal tracking technology or 'biologging'

Irish waters contain 71 species of elasmobranchs — a group that includes sharks, skates, and rays. This list includes small sharks and rays, such as dogfish and thornback rays that are considered abundant and regularly caught by anglers, to rarer large-bodied species, such as the porbeagle shark and flapper skate, measuring over two metres in total length.

There are two key uniting features of all these species: