[imagesource: Aquarium and Shark Lab by Team ECCO]

A North Carolina stingray’s pregnancy was a heated conversation on the internet, with thousands of netizens heavily invested in what kind of offspring she would produce.

The Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO said in February that the stingray, Charlotte, was carrying three or four pups. The catch was that the aquarium had no male stingrays, which left people scratching their heads over how she could have possibly become pregnant.

The round stingray was also found covered in shark bites, a sign of mating for that species. While the aquarium does not have a male stingray, they did keep Charlotte in an aquarium with two young male sharks.

The aquarium suggested that Charlotte was pregnant either by those sharks or through parthenogenesis, a rare phenomenon where small cells from the mother’s eggs are created and merged with the egg to create offspring.

While experts said it was impossible for the stingray to be impregnated by sharks, people waited with bated breath for the creature to give birth so that they could see for themselves.

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The Hendersonville aquarium said it was initially afraid Charlotte had cancer when she began to swell, but ultrasound results confirmed the multiple growths within her body were indeed eggs.

But can stingrays and sharks even have pups together? Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, told the AP this theory is impossible. The two animals are different sizes, the animals wouldn’t match up anatomically and neither would their DNA, she explained.

“We should set the record straight that there aren’t some shark-ray shenanigans happening here,” Lyons told the outlet.

But when Charlotte was expected to deliver her pups about two weeks ago, she never did. The aquarium offered a new explanation for the mystery: the stingray had never been pregnant at all, but had instead developed a “rare reproductive disease”, per CBS News:

In one of its frequent updates on social media, staff from the Hendersonville aquarium said on Friday that reports based on data and lab and testing results showed that the stingray had an unnamed disease that had “negatively impacted her reproductive system.”

The aquarium said there was only limited research into the disease, and could not specify what the illness was besides a reproductive condition.

Veterinarians and specialists are working to “better understand this disease and the treatment options for Charlotte,” the aquarium said, noting in a later post that they have not found relevant studies on southern rays like Charlotte.

The aquarium concluded that they hope Charlotte’s case and medical treatment will positively contribute to science and be of benefit to other rays in the future.

I guess we’re not getting sharkrays in 2024 afterall.

[sources:cbsnews]