Charlotte, a rust-colored stingray the scale of a serving platter, has spent a lot of her life gliding across the confines of a storefront aquarium in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains.
She’s 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from her pure habitat underneath the waves off southern California. And she hasn’t shared a tank of water with a male of her species in at the very least eight years.
And but nature has discovered a manner, the aquarium’s proprietor mentioned: The stingray is pregnant with as many as 4 pups and will give delivery within the subsequent two weeks.
“Here’s our girl saying, ’Hey, Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s have some pups!” mentioned Brenda Ramer, govt director of the Aquarium and Shark Lab on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville.
An skilled on the stingrays mentioned it could have been inconceivable for Charlotte to have mated with one of many 5 small sharks that share her tank, regardless of information reviews suggesting that was the case after Ramer joked a few doable interspecies hookup.
The small aquarium is run by Ramer’s instructional nonprofit, Team ECCO, which inspires native schoolchildren and others to take an curiosity in science.
Its greatest lesson now’s on the method of parthenogenesis: a kind of asexual replica by which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, that means there isn’t any genetic contribution by a male.
The largely uncommon phenomenon can happen in some bugs, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, however not mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.
Kady Lyons, a analysis scientist on the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta who is just not concerned with the North Carolina aquarium, mentioned Charlotte’s pregnancy is the one documented instance she’s conscious of for this species, spherical stingrays.
But Lyons isn’t in any respect shocked. Other sorts of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals usually grouped collectively — have had these sorts of pregnancies in human care.
“I’m not surprised, because nature finds a way of having this happen,” she mentioned.
To be clear, Lyons mentioned, these animals are usually not cloning themselves. Instead, a feminine’s egg fuses with one other cell, triggers cell division and results in the creation of an embryo.
The cell that fuses with the egg is called a polar body. They are produced when a feminine is creating an egg however normally aren’t used.
“We don’t know why it happens,” Lyons mentioned. “Just that it’s kind of this really neat phenomenon that they seem to be able to do.”
Ramer mentioned she and others on the nonprofit at first thought that Charlotte had a tumor once they observed a lump on her again that was “blowing up like a biscuit.” But an ultrasound revealed her pregnancy.
“We were all like, ’Shut the back door. There’s no way,” Ramer mentioned. ”We thought we had been overfeeding her. But we had been overfeeding her as a result of she has extra mouths to feed.”
Charlotte at present lives in a tank that’s about 2,200 gallons (8,300 liters), or practically the scale of a building dumpster. Ramer mentioned they’re hoping to get a tank practically twice that dimension to accommodate Charlotte’s offspring. They additionally need to put stay cameras up for folks to see them.
“It is very rare to happen,” Ramer mentioned. “But it’s happening in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean.”
As for the suggestion that Charlotte may have been impregnated by a shark, Lyons mentioned that’s inconceivable. Besides being completely different sizes, the animals wouldn’t match up anatomically. Neither would their DNA.
“We should set the record straight that there aren’t some shark-ray shenanigans happening here,” mentioned Lyons, whose graduate work centered on the species.
Round stingrays like Charlotte are plentiful on the Pacific coasts of southern California and Mexico, usually resting on the ocean’s sandy backside close to the shoreline.
In the wild they’re sometimes the scale of a small dinner plate, and their identify comes from their round form. They are available in all shades of brown. They eat small worms, crabs and mollusks, and they’re preyed upon by sure forms of sharks, seals and big sea bass.
They’re well-known to people due to their painful sting, usually ensuing from a beachgoer’s foot stepping on them. Southern California lifeguards encourage folks to do the so-called stingray shuffle as they wade through the water, largely due to spherical stingrays.
Lyons finds the species fascinating. For instance, embryos within the womb are bathed in uterine milk that gives vitamins to assist them develop.
“I’m glad the round stingray is getting the media attention that it deserves,” Lyons mentioned. “It’s not necessarily as sexy as a white shark, but they do a lot of really neat stuff.”
