North Carolina Aquarium Surprised as Female Stingray Becomes Pregnant with No Male Stingrays Nearby
A North Carolina aquarium is dealing with a remarkable occurrence: a pregnant stingray without an apparent mate.
The Hendersonville-based Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO is home to Charlotte, a female round stingray. Initially, staff feared Charlotte might have cancer.
Brenda Ramer, the aquarium's founder and executive director, shared with Fox News Digital her surprise when she noticed Charlotte's swelling.
"We've always known she was a she," Ramer chuckled. "It's very easy to tell the difference with sharks and rays."
"We noticed that she had started to, in simple terms, swell," she said. "So we decided to ultrasound her, and we saw what we thought were lumps or growths inside of her."
To their relief, the lumps turned out not to be tumors at all. They were pups – despite Charlotte having had no recent contact with male stingrays.
"We sent [the ultrasound] off to have some other folks look at it, and they said, 'You know, those are eggs.' And we're like, 'Okay, well this is great,'" Ramer recalled.
The aquarium, the first inland one in North Carolina, has been consulting with experts from Australia and the United Kingdom regarding this unusual occurrence.
The expectant stingray likely reproduced through a method called parthenogenesis.
"The cells within the egg will split, and they create a clone of the mother," Ramer explained. "Our little shark has laid around 900 eggs in the past eight years, and she has had 14 of those eggs grow embryos with no fertilization."
"It's such a hard concept to even think about, but I always tell people, think about the very first Jurassic Park movie. The dinosaurs did the exact same thing."
Ramer floated the idea that a male shark in the tank impregnated the stingray but conceded that it "is really not that strong of a possibility."
"Anything is really possible when it comes to animals," the aquarium's assistant director, Kinsley Boyette, told Fox News Digital.
For now, the aquarium believes that Charlotte is likely reproducing asexually.
Ramer said that the response from the local community has been supportive and that the soon-to-be mama is doing well.
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