Update On North Carolina Sting Ray That Could Be Pregnant By Shark
A Hendersonville, North Carolina stingray may have been impregnated by a shark. The aquarium staff is stunned the ray has become pregnant. Here’s the weird part, her only tankmates are sharks. The Aquarium and Shark Lab is located in downtown Hendersonville. The team there initially thought Charlotte the stingray might have cancer when they started to notice swelling in September. But a new theory popped up! Maybe she’s pregnant! That theory turned out to be true. There are two options for how this happened: that she’s got four clones she’s growing which is really rare or that one of the sharks did the deed. Both options are beyond bizarre. With the clones option. the eggs would have to develop on their own without fertilization and create a clone of the mother. Woah!
The other possibility is the female stingray was impregnated by one of the male one-year-old sharks they placed in her tank in July.
“In mid-July 2023, we moved two 1-year-old white spot bamboo males (sharks) into that tank. There was nothing we could find definitively about their maturation rate, so we did not think there would be an issue,” a staffer said. “We started to notice bite marks on Charlotte, but saw other fish nipping at her, so we moved fish, but the biting continued.”
Bite marks are an indicator of mating in sharks.
Because, well their sharks and that’s how they do haha. Apparently large fishes are know to bite during the mating process. Charlotte had several bites on her fin edges Fox News reported.
These crazy North Carolina stingray man I tell ya you never know what they’ll do! Haha.
The update is there’s no pups yet, and experts say rays can’t mate with sharks! Standing by!