Taxonomy

Rarity

Shovelnose guitarfish are common on Southern California sand and are one of the animals a diver working a bay or a sand flat can expect to see. The IUCN lists the species as Near Threatened, and that assessment dates from December 2014, which makes it more than 10 years old and worth treating as a floor rather than a current reading. A 2022 global review of guitarfishes and their relatives found that this species has a lower intrinsic rate of population increase than most of its group, which means it recovers more slowly from fishing than the animals it is usually grouped with. It was once thrown back as a trash fish and now has commercial demand. Nothing about the California population suggests it is in trouble today, and nothing about a 2014 rating on a slow-breeding ray should be read as reassurance either.

Seasonality

Location

Shovelnose guitarfish live only in the eastern Pacific, from San Francisco south to the Gulf of California and possibly as far as Mazatlan. The range on paper reaches central California; the range that matters to a diver is south of Point Conception, because this is a warm-water animal that thins out fast at the northern end. It holds on sand and mud in bays, estuaries and eelgrass beds and on the sand alongside rocky reef. Records run from 3 feet to about 300 feet, but nearly every fish is shallower than 45. In Southern California the concentrations are in San Diego Bay, Mission Bay and San Pedro Bay.

The behavior is split between day and night, and the daytime half is what a diver sees. By day the fish lies buried in sand with only its eyes above the bottom, waiting for a crab or a small flatfish to wander past. Its color, olive to sandy brown above and white below, matches the bottom closely enough that the outline is often the only thing that gives it away. At night it comes out of the sand and hunts actively along the bottom for crabs, worms, clams and small fish. The body shape is the reason for the name: a flat, triangular, sharply pointed snout leading into a thick tail, which reads as a guitar laid on the sand.

Deep Dive

Guitarfish sit in an awkward and interesting place in the family tree. They are rays, in the same broad group as stingrays and skates, but they belong to an order whose members kept a shark-like tail and a strong swimming stroke rather than adopting the flapping wing-flight of a stingray. The result is an animal that swims like a shark from the middle back and looks like a ray from the middle forward. The same order contains the sawfishes, and that shared ancestry is part of why conservation biologists watch guitarfishes as closely as they do.

The scientific name on this fish changed in 2016 and the old one is still everywhere. The genus it had sat in for over a century was split, and the eastern Pacific species were moved into a new genus, so the binomial in the frontmatter above will not match the one printed in most field guides, in older California fishery literature, or in any regulation reference written before the split. Nothing about the animal changed. Anyone comparing an older source to a newer one should expect the mismatch and not read it as 2 different fish.

The life history is slow in the way that gets rays into trouble. Females mature at about age 7, at roughly 34 to 39 inches. Gestation runs about 12 months, so a female is pregnant essentially year-round, and a litter is 6 to 28 pups. The species is ovoviviparous, which means the eggs develop and hatch inside the mother and the pups are nourished by yolk rather than by any placental connection, so they emerge as fully formed miniature adults. A fish that carries young for a year and delivers at most 28 at a time cannot replace losses quickly, and that is the arithmetic behind the 2022 finding that this species rebuilds more slowly than other guitarfishes.

The animal is unusually safe to be around, and that is worth saying plainly because it looks like something that is not. A shovelnose guitarfish has no barb, no sting and no spine. It is a ray in shape and a ray in family, but it carries none of the defensive equipment of a stingray, which is the single most useful thing for a diver to know when one lifts off the sand alongside them. The teeth are blunt crushing plates built for crabs and clams, and the mouth is on the underside, so a person looking down at one is not in the way of much. It is not bite-proof, and at least one documented bite involved a diver who interrupted a male in courtship, but the damage a plate-toothed mouth can do is limited.

Spotting one is a slow sand hunt, and an easier one than most. The search works from 8 to 15 feet off the bottom, along eelgrass edges, bay channels and the sand margins beside reef, reading the bottom rather than covering ground. A buried guitarfish is a much larger and less subtle shape than a buried halibut, and the tail lying out behind the buried body breaks the outline in a way a flatfish never does. The tells are the 2 raised eyes, the faint triangular outline of the snout, and that ridge of tail along the sand. An unalarmed fish holds while a diver eases in from the side, and a rushed or vertical drop-in sends it off the bottom to resettle somewhere else.

Take is legal. The species has no entry of its own in the California ocean sport fishing regulations, which leaves it under the general limit of 20 finfish in combination with no more than 10 of any one species, with no size limit and no closed season, and California counts rays as finfish. The meat is in 2 long narrow fillets running down the tail rather than in the wings, which is the opposite of a skate, and California angling writers have described it in the same terms for decades: firm, mild, and close enough to scallops in taste and texture that the comparison gets made by default.

Size is the last surprise. The largest recorded shovelnose guitarfish is a female at about 67 inches, and anglers have reported fish over 5 feet and past 40 pounds. Males top out considerably smaller, around 47 inches. What a diver actually meets on a sand flat is a fish 2 to 4 feet long. The very large ones are rare enough that a 5-footer on the sand is a story worth telling, and old enough that it has been carrying pups for well over a decade.

Where to Find Them

Beaches whose habitats match this species

Matched by habitat: a beach is listed when its biome tags overlap this species' biomes.