skate/ thornie

But Denim is a cloth and Levi is a manufactuer.....why you complicating it :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Tom.

Common names are often a bone of contention. The truth is, the only way you can be entirely unambiguous is to use the scientific name. The online Fishbase species catalogue has a list of common names for each species and where the names are in use. I often look at this before I go on holiday. The site is http://www.fishbase.org

Ed

The only fish in our waters that can truly be called Skate are the longnosed skate, the white skate, and the common skate.
The thornback ray has many local names like thornie and roker, but the name skate was born out of the british love for fish n chips, where any of the ray species used in the fish n chip shops ended up being called Skate,
giving us the dish "skate and chips"
thats how we ended up calling them Skate.
bit like the monkfish really....
Dave

[Sonaghan]

The Handbook of the Marine Fauna of North-West Europe (Hayward & Ryland) says, 'The long-snouted species are customarily termed skates, and the short-snouted species, rays.' I think this is a good classification for various reasons, one being that size is irrelevant (allowing for manta ray, etc.). Again, the use of the word 'customarily' does qualify the sentence, taking into account that different people have different customs. Previous posters are likely to be correct in that the use of skate in reference to all Rajiformes originally came from the commercial sector.

Ed

Last edited by Sonaghan on Thu Aug 02, 2007 10:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think people really care what specific species the lump of battered flesh beside their chips was before it was bisected and lobbed into the deep fat fryer. I doubt a skate tastes much different to a ray and the various species of skate and ray are probably indistinguishable from each other when cooked. So I can see the logic behind calling them all skate. Joe public might get confused otherwise. :?