> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Manta rays of Lady Elliot Island: every belly is a fingerprint, and your snorkel photo can read it - URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/manta-ray/ - Published: 2026-10-30T05:32:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T09:23:33.000Z - Description: Reef mantas gather off Lady Elliot Island each winter, once almost 80 in a day, and each carries belly spots as personal as a fingerprint. Project Manta reads them from photographs that snorkellers send in, and the Australian Geographic Society is raising money for its tags. - Author: Nicole McMahon - Tags: Wildlife, All stories Picture the shallows off Lady Elliot Island on a winter morning, a coral cay at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, and a manta ray banking past a snorkeller, mouth wide, sieving plankton, then turning back for another look. "They seem as curious about us as we are about them," says Dr Asia Haines, principal scientist with Project Manta at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Winter is when the upwellings bring the zooplankton and the reef mantas gather in their greatest numbers, and on one extraordinary day scientists counted almost 80 of them feeding together around the island. We watched them ourselves, gliding past the jetty, in our Lady Elliot story in August. Now the Australian Geographic Society has made the rays its spring fundraiser, "Ray of hope", with the money going to Haines and her team for acoustic and satellite tags and for teaching the next generation of ocean ambassadors. Until about 2008 the world believed there was a single manta ray species; it took a conservation biologist, Dr Andrea Marshall, watching two different kinds swim side by side to see that there were more, and she did the first PhD on mantas less than two decades ago. There are now three recognised species, and two of them live in Australian waters. ![A reef manta ray hovering above a coral bommie at a cleaning station, small fish around it](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/11/manta-uramowski-cleaning.jpg) A reef manta ray at a cleaning station off Lady Elliot Island, presenting itself to the cleaner wrasse that remove parasites and tend any wounds. Photo: Patrick Uramowski, Australian Geographic Society. What makes Project Manta lovely is who does the counting. Every manta carries a scatter of black spots across its white underside, as individual as a fingerprint, and anyone with a camera underwater can photograph one. "We can match that animal and suddenly know where it was seen 10 years ago, where it has travelled, and how its life has unfolded," Haines says. Thousands of photographs from divers, snorkellers and tourism operators have built a national database of more than 3,000 individual rays since the project began studying Australian mantas in 2006, and the tags fill in what cameras cannot: night, rough seas, the open ocean. When the team satellite tagged five mantas off Lady Elliot in 2023, every one of them swam south to the northern tip of K'gari, to a place called Long Shoals that nobody knew was a manta site at all. Reef mantas are listed as Vulnerable, and they are slow to breed: a female may be 10 before her first pup, carries it for more than a year, and in some places waits up to eight years between pups, which is why every tag and every belly photograph counts. "It really empowers people to be part of the research," Haines says. You can give through the Society, or take your camera to Lady Elliot on Australian Geographic Travel's citizen science tour, which funds the project too, and add a ray to the book. ![A reef manta ray swimming over a coral bommie in blue water](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/11/manta-uramowski-bommie.jpg) Over the bommies at Lady Elliot Island, where Project Manta counts the rays by their bellies. Photo: Patrick Uramowski, Australian Geographic Society. ### Sources and links Our short take: from the Australian Geographic Society's "Ray of hope" (Chrissie Goldrick, 10 September 2026, photographs by Patrick Uramowski) and Project Manta's pages at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Photographs: as credited in captions. - [Australian Geographic Society, "Ray of hope"](https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2026/09/ray-of-hope/) The Haines quotes, the 80 ray day, the three species, what the money buys. - [Help protect the manta rays, the Society's donation page](https://shop.australiangeographic.com.au/products/help-protect-the-manta-rays-donate-now) Where to give. - [Project Manta, University of the Sunshine Coast](https://www.unisc.edu.au/about/structure/schools/school-of-science-technology-and-engineering/project-manta) The Vulnerable listing, 1,150 km movements, 700 m dives, how to send in a photo. - [UniSC, "Study to uncover secrets of hidden manta ray habitat" (2 September 2023)](https://www.unisc.edu.au/about/unisc-news/news-archive/2023/june/study-to-uncover-secrets-of-hidden-manta-ray-habitat) Since 2006, more than 3,000 individuals, the five tagged rays and Long Shoals. - [Manta Rays on Lady Elliot Island, an Australian Geographic citizen science expedition](https://australiangeographictravel.com/tours/manta-rays-on-lady-elliot-island-an-australian-geographic-citizen-science-expedition) The tour that funds the project. - [our Lady Elliot story](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/lady-elliot/) The island that was mined bare grew back (12 August 2026).