Sea Lab Sidebar: Rays of the Bay, Alabama Aquarium

Transcript

Welcome to the Sea Lab Sidebar. Your quick dive into the science, people and discoveries shaping our goal. Join us as we explore the research and stories happening every day at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

Angela Levins, PR Director Joining us today is Alabama Aquarium Director Mendel Graeber. Thank you so much for being here.

Mendel Graeber, Alabama Aquarium Executive Director Good morning. I’m glad to glad to chat with you.

Levins Mendel. Today we’re going to chat about stingrays and our rays of the Bay tank at the Alabama Aquarium is a visitor favorite. Can you tell us what stingrays we have in the rays of the bay tank?

Graeber Our rays of the Bay touch tank includes Atlantic stingrays and cownose rays. A small southern stingray that was given to us by the Tennessee Aquarium and a blunt nosed Ray

Levins Mendel. What can you tell us about stingrays and about their lifestyle?

Graeber Most rays are solitary and hang out on the bottom. They will use those fins not only for swimming, but for burying themselves so they can flip sand over their bodies and kind of hide on the bottom. The cownose rays that we have are an exception to this sort of lifestyle. They school and they spend a lot more of their time swimming

Levins The cownose rays, those are the big ones that whenever we feed them, they spin around really fast and get really excited. And that’s what you’re talking about with the schooling side of things. Do they forage on the bottom?

Graber They will forage on the bottom, but they also migrate. And so sometimes they are seen in very large schools. And because they’re swimming near the surface, sometimes their fins will break the surface and they are sometimes mistaken for sharks.

Levins Interesting. Let’s go back to the other stingrays that we have, the Atlantic and the Bluntnose and the southern stingray. So these guys, you said they stay on the bottom. Why do they stay on the bottom?

Graeber Well, their food is on the bottom and they hide. They camouflage themselves on the bottom. It helps hide them from their predators, and it helps them ambush their prey. They’ll dig up little worms and other kinds of little invertebrates, and they hide because they have predators who will come along and pin them to the bottom and eat them. They are a favorite of hammerhead sharks. Unfortunately, that habit of hanging out on the bottom is where people sometimes come into conflict with stingrays. They can be hard to see, and sometimes people step on them and their defense from their natural predators, or from a person stepping on them, is their stinger. They have a barb that is about halfway between their body and the end of their tail, and so they can whip that up and defend themselves from a predator or a person that’s pinning them to the bottom. So one effective way to avoid accidentally stepping on a stingray is to do the stingray shuffle. If you are walking through the sand at the beach, in the water. If you kick the sand up a little bit and shuffle your feet as you walk through the water, the stingrays. Generally, they’re not going to wait around for you to step on them. They’ll move out of the way. They can kind of sense the vibrations that you’re creating and, and tell that something’s moving towards them and they will move out of the way.

Levins So kind of like a snake, they don’t want to hang around and see what’s going on. They just, they just want to move on.

Graeber Right? They’re not, they wouldn’t chase you down and sting you. They’re not trying to target people. It’s, it’s their defense.

Levins It’s like a reflex. You know, if somebody was to step on your hand, you’re going to, you know, pull it away. And so therefore they.

Graeber Exactly.

Levins So the barb that you talk about, what I think is interesting about it is that it grows kind of like our fingernails grow, right?

Graeber Yeah. They often will lose the barb when they sting out of defense. It will come off of their tail and then they will grow a new one.

Levins So the stingrays that we have, the Atlantic, the Bluntnose, the southern stingray, these are ones that we find within our area, within the brackish water.

Graeber They are. They can be found in Mobile Bay or the northern Gulf along Alabama’s shore, the cownose rays migrate, so we tend to see them in the warmer months, and then they migrate out of our area.

Levins Mendel, one of the things that I find interesting is how stingrays give birth. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Graeber In the broader group of animals, that of their relatives, rays and sharks and skates. It’s kind of interesting because some species give live birth, some lay eggs, and some have eggs that are internal. And then when the eggs hatch, the babies are born. So that is an interesting characteristic of that group of animals. The rays that we have locally give live birth, then skates which look a lot like rays but lack the venomous barb lay eggs. The skates that we have in our area lay an egg that people refer to as a mermaid’s purse, and those wash up on our beaches and people find them and they almost look like a piece of plastic. So you kind of have to know what you’re looking at. Or you might assume that it’s beach trash, but the mermaid’s purses that we find on our beaches come from skates. There are places, other parts of the world where those mermaid’s purses are coming from sharks. But our sharks also in this area, give live birth.

Levins And while we can’t go into the wild, we can see everything here. And we can talk to our aquarist with the daily feedings, correct?

Graeber Yeah. We have daily feedings at two o’clock, and you can visit the rays and our rays of the Bay touch tank and have a close and safe encounter with a stingray. We have a viewing window, so you can get a couple of different views of the rays and, you know, watch how they move through the water and how they feed.

Levins Wonderful. Thank you. Mendel.

Graeber Thank you.