The common stingrays have occasionally been spotted off the coast in previous years, but catches and sightings have risen in the past year as the fish move north from more established habitats in the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean.
The rays, cousins of the similarly sized bull ray that last week killed Steve Irwin, the Australian naturalist, can be dangerous if provoked but are generally placid.
In the past year more than 400 common stingrays have been caught by fishermen or sea anglers off a 70-mile stretch of coast between Galway Bay and Dingle Bay in western Ireland.
Some of the increase may be due to increased fishing but experts say the figure, a 10-fold increase since 1996, is likely to be similar across the coasts of the warmer counties of western England, especially Cornwall and Devon.
“We can regard them as a resident species throughout the year and it is likely they are breeding in waters from Cornwall in the west to Dorset in the east,” said Kelvin Boot, director of the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth.
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“It would not surprise us to know there is an increase when you consider the other species of fish we are now finding in our waters which are moving in from warmer areas.”
Kevin Flannery, a government fisheries inspector in Dingle, said: “I have noticed a big influx of them and they are now here in their hundreds. They are coming up here because of the increase in warmer temperatures.”
The rays, flat fish that can be more than 6ft long, feed off small crustaceans such as crabs and shrimps living in shallow waters, often just a few hundred feet from the shore.
Despite the dramatic death of Irwin, stingrays are considered to be docile fish that use their barbed tails, laced with poison, only when provoked. Before Irwin was killed when a ray flicked its tail into his heart off the coast of Queensland, the last recorded stingray death in Australia was in 1945.