Who’s the dad? Stingray pregnant without any male companion of her species in aquarium
Stingray
An unusual pregnancy has baffled the officials in an aquarium in North Carolina, US, as it has announced that a stingray is pregnant with as many as four pups and could give birth in the next two weeks.
But the shocking part is, she currently is around 3,700 kilometres away from her natural habitat which is under the waves off southern California and she hasn't shared a tank of water with a male of her species in at least eight years.
Brenda Ramer, who is the executive director of the Aquarium and Shark Lab on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville, "Here's our girl saying, 'Hey, Happy Valentine's Day! Let's have some pups!"
Then who is the dad?
Last week, Team Ecco's Aquarium & Shark Lab in Hendersonville announced on the social media platform Facebook that its stingray Charlotte is pregnant.
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In the post, the aquarium described the pregnancy as "a once-in-a-lifetime science mystery". They revealed that there were no male stingrays in the tank with the female when she became pregnant.
The aquarium posted two photos of Charlotte and in the post, Dr Robert Jones, the Aquarium Zvet out of Australia, and Becka Campbell, PhD candidate at Arizona State Univ, wrote: "Our stingray, Charlotte, is expecting! We have held this close to our hearts for over 3 months. We have ultrasound images confirmed by two supporters."
"The really amazing thing is we have no male ray! We do have a couple of possible reasons For this event," the post added.
Did she mate with sharks? Or is it something else?
Some reports claimed so, but an expert on stingrays claimed Charlotte could not have mated with one of the five small sharks in her aquarium, despite news stories implying such was the case after Ramer joked about an interspecies coupling, The Associated Press reported.
The news agency further said in its report that if not for sharks, another rare process could have been the reason, which is called parthenogenesis. It happens when eggs develop on their own without fertilisation and create a clone of the mother.
This phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. However, it has been documented in California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.
(With inputs from agencies)