There is a stingray named Charlotte. She lives at a North Carolina aquarium and shark lab. Charlotte is pregnant. That’s not totally weird or news by itself, except for the fact that Charlotte the stingray had no access to male stingrays ever in her life. Now at 12-14 years of age, she’s carrying possibly up to four pups, and their conception is a baffling thing.
“We have been doing ultrasound on our ray, Charlotte, since September, when she began to swell,” Brenda Ramer of Team Ecco explained. “We documented multiple ‘growths’ internally and initially thought she had a cancer.”
Two young male bamboo sharks were recently added to Charlotte’s tank, and the team started to notice some marks on the stingray. “We started to notice bite marks on Charlotte, but saw other fish nipping at her, so we moved fish, but the biting continued,” Ramer said. “There was nothing we could find definitively about their maturation rate, so we did not think there would be an issue.”
There have been cases of other animals going through something called parthenogenesis, where the eggs inside the female develop into clones of the mother. The aquarium is not unfamiliar with this kind of occurrence. “We’ve had experience with Parthenogenesis with [a female bamboo shark] 14 different times,” Ramer said. “We had one baby that lived 30 days outside of the egg.”
So, it *is* possible Charlotte was impregnated by one of the male sharks. Which means she could be carrying a shark’s baby. Or, that she’s making direct clones of herself. They won’t know until the pups are born. The plan is to do a DNA test on them to see what exactly happened, “Maury” style. This is the first documented occurrence in stingrays in 25 years. The team is calling this a very rare experience.
When Charlotte does have her pups, if they live to full gestation, the aquarium plans to increase the size of Charlotte’s tank and keep the family together. So either way if the pups are the result of male sharks or Charlotte herself, in the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Life uh, finds a way.”
