Remember a couple of months back when people thought a stingray named Charlotte was about to pop out a shark-ray hybrid? The aquarium responsible for her care has now posted an update on her pregnancy – and sadly it doesn’t feature little baby shingrays.
Sharing a video of Charlotte on
In other words, Charlotte is healthy, but still very much pregnant. Round stingrays such as Charlotte typically have a gestation period of
Interest in the pregnancy was piqued when some claimed that her offspring might be
“In mid-July 2023, we moved two 1-year-old white spot bamboo males (sharks) into that tank. There was nothing we could find definitively about their maturation rate, so we did not think there would be an issue,” said Ramer. “We started to notice bite marks on Charlotte, but saw other fish nipping at her, so we moved fish, but the biting continued.”
Staff then suspected Charlotte might be pregnant later that year.
However, the shingray theory was swiftly debunked by animal experts. “They wouldn’t be able to produce viable pups even if they could mate,” stingray expert Dr Joni Pini-Fitzsimmons, research fellow at Charles Darwin University, told
The much more likely explanation for Charlotte’s pregnancy is parthenogenesis, stemming from the Greek words for “virgin birth”. You might have heard of this in the latest Jurassic World movie, where female velociraptor Blue managed to make a little raptor without a baby daddy – but while this is a fictional representation, parthenogenesis is a very real, albeit rare, phenomenon.
It’s a type of asexual reproduction, the ultimate example of sisters