Ballina Beastie

Recently, a "Weird Fish: Unidentified Marine Creature!" was hooked near Ballina. Ballina is nestled on the Far North Coast of NSW at the mouth of the Richmond River (the longest navigable river on the coast of NSW), Australia.

We decided to go fishing and try out our recently acquired boat. My husband, son and I were fishing at Ballina on the Richmond River. It was around the change of tide, I had my rod in the rod holder, when suddenly the line took off, the rod bent over and I nearly fell over trying to get to it before the rod went in!

I grabbed the rod, hooked it up and started trying to reel her in! About half an hour later, after pulling the boat around a bit, I finally got what ever it was up to the surface and realised that it had gotten caught up in our anchor rope, Damn!

My husband grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of what I caught, we haven’t seen anything like it before!

At first we thought it was some kind of Sting Ray, but it had no tail, instead it had what looked like the front of a Manter Ray? and the head was different to a Ray.

Unfortunately we didn’t get it in the boat to have a really good look at it, and had to cut the line because of the Anchor rope.

Is it a Pacific (also called an Atlantic) manta or giant manta (Manta birostris, Dondorff, 1798), that has lost its tail – with a misidentified eye? Below is a drawing of a complete example.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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