iStockphoto / Lindsay Lou
There is a very strange situation developing at The Aquarium and Shark Lab by Team Ecco in Hendersonville, North Carolina where a pregnant stingray will soon give birth to four pups based on imaging.
There’s nothing odd about a pregnant stingray in and of itself. It’s life. It happens every day. But this female stingray was in a tank with no males. In fact, there were no male stingrays anywhere at all at the aquarium.
Upping in the intrigue, there were sharks in the pregnant stingray’s tank and these particular sharks leave a bite mark when/after mating and, you guessed it, this stingray had a bite mark from a shark prior to the pregnancy.
The theory that there could be stingray-shark hybrids about to pop out has taken off like wildfire on social media. One video has picked up over 600K views in just a few hours:
A Pregnant Stingray About To Have Half-Shark Babies? Experts Say No
The stingray, Charlotte, is expected to give birth within the next few weeks. Initially, aquarium staff feared she had cancer after her stomach grew, or they were overfeeding her, but an ultrasound revealed the pregnancy with up to 4 pups.
Here she is ‘eating for 5’ yesterday:
Kady Lyons is a researcher at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, one of the most prestigious and expansive aquariums in the United States, and she wants to make it clear that Charlotte the pregnant stingray is not about to have half-shark babies. Lyons told Ben Finley of the Associated Press about parthenogenesis, a rare form of asexual reproduction.
Wiki says “Parthenogenesis is a natural form of asexual reproduction where an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg cell. The word comes from the Greek words for “virgin birth”.”
As far as Kady Lyons and other scientists are aware, this is the first documented case of Parthenogenesis in round stingrays. However, this phenomenon has been observed in other rays, sharks, and skates. But Lyons is adamant that stingray DNA and shark DNA would not mix and reproduction between the two species simply cannot happen, adding “we should set the record straight that there aren’t some shark-ray shenanigans happening here.”