span style="font-family: Arial"> Introduced last week for the first time, loyal
reader Bill Noble has made another submission, gleaned from the Internet, and it
is an incredible set of pictures of rays slowly migrating south to Mexico’s Yucatan.
We’re told that the pictures shown here were taken in June. The migrating rays are
called golden rays, cownose rays, hawkrays, or Pacific Ocean golden rays.

A school of about 10,000 golden rays migrating from Florida to the Yucatan – that’s upstream, folks!

This is a species of fish in the Rhinopteridae family. They are found in Colombia,
Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama,
and Peru. Their natural habitats are open seas, shallow seas, tidal aquatic beds,
estuarine waters, intertidal marshes, and coastal saline lagoons. Sandra Critelli,
an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale
sharks. She said, 'It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface
of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a
bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind."

Gliding silently beneath the waves they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.

“We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface, too” said Sandra.

Measuring up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) from wing-tip to wing-tip, golden rays are also more prosaically known as cownose rays.

We have our loyal reader Bill Noble to thank for bringing these
amazing pictures to our attention. Our “finder’s fee” arrangement with Bill is to
show our gratitude with six packs of his favorite beverage – Coors Light. We generally
pay him from one to four six-packs, depending on how popular his offering is among
our readers. This week we would like YOU to tell us how much to pay Bill – if anything
at all! Just drop us a note in the form below…