The third manta ray species has a name. Almost nothing else.

If you’ve dived Florida, the Keys, Cozumel, or anywhere off the Brazilian coast and had a manta encounter that didn’t quite match what your identification book showed you — you weren’t wrong. You were probably swimming with a species that didn’t have a name yet.

It has one now. Mobula yarae — named for Yara, a water spirit from Indigenous Brazilian mythology — was formally described on July 23, 2025, in Environmental Biology of Fishes. Third manta ray species. Endemic to the western Atlantic, from Massachusetts down to southern Brazil, all through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Coastal preference. V-shaped shoulder patches instead of the giant manta’s T. Lighter face. Dark spots clustered around the abdomen.

Andrea Marshall predicted this species existed back in 2009 — same landmark paper where she split the reef manta off from the oceanic. In July 2017 a dead manta washed up off Pompano Beach, Florida, and became the type specimen. Jessica Pate at the Florida Manta Project has been documenting a nursery in shallow water off Palm Beach County for years. The paper finally landed this summer, carried across the line by Nayara Bucair at the University of São Paulo and by Pate after Marshall suffered a severe brain aneurysm in early 2024.

That’s the science. All the resources still need to catch up.

What the industry is telling divers right now

PADI’s “Top 12 Best Places to Dive with Manta Rays” — the piece that ranks high whenever anyone Googles the topic — still says there are two species of manta ray. Liveaboard.com’s manta guide says the same, and still uses the pre-2017 genus name Manta (it’s been Mobula for nine years). Neither mentions the Atlantic, Florida, or any of the twenty-year research trail that led here.

The Manta Trust — the conservation partner PADI cites in that same blog — updated their species pages. The consumer-facing industry content hasn’t followed.

The accountability question

This matters more than the taxonomy.

M. birostris — the giant oceanic manta — is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. M. alfredi — reef — is vulnerable. M. yarae has no independent listing at all. It’s still lumped in with the oceanic. Which means two things at once: the endangered giant manta’s population numbers were probably inflated by Atlantic sightings that were actually yarae, and the actual conservation status of yarae — a coastal species getting hit by boat strikes and fishing line entanglement off Florida, and shrimp trawling in the Gulf of Mexico — is officially unknown.

No ESA listing. No independent IUCN assessment. The ICCAT mobulid retention ban that took effect in July 2025 predates the paper and doesn’t specifically address yarae as a distinct species.

Jessica Pate said it directly: “You can’t protect what you haven’t formally identified.”

The regulatory infrastructure for a species doesn’t appear the day the paper publishes. Someone has to build it. Right now, no one is officially on the hook.

This isn’t a piece about what individual divers should do differently in the water. Give mantas the same distance you would have given them on Monday. That’s not the point. The point is that a large, coastal, likely-threatened marine vertebrate got formally named last summer, and the regulatory system that’s supposed to protect it hasn’t moved yet — and the industry content that shapes how millions of divers understand mantas hasn’t updated either. Both of those are fixable. Neither is your fault as a diver. Both are worth naming.

If you’re headed to Jupiter, Palm Beach, Cozumel, or a Brazilian liveaboard this year, you’re hopefully about to swim with one. It has a name now. We should probably get around to protecting it.