With some fascinating new additions, North Carolina Hendersonville’s aquarium and shark lab is anticipating a remarkable birth any day. Charlotte is a pregnant stingray at the Aquarium and Shark Lab by Team ECCO in downtown Hendersonville.
However, because this pregnancy is unlike any other, the team believed that Charlotte’s bulge, which they first saw in September, might be cancer.
Why? Considering that there were no male stingrays in the tank, they reasoned that she could not have gotten pregnant. There are still two possibilities for Charlotte to become pregnant, though, and the team won’t be able to determine which one until the pups are delivered.
Photo byPaul Souders via Getty Images
One is a highly uncommon process known as parthenogenesis, in which the eggs grow without fertilization and produce a mother clone on their own.
Since September, when our daughter Charlotte started to “swell,” we have been doing ultrasounds on her. We recorded several ‘growths’ within and initially believed she had cancer,” Ramer wrote in an email on February 1. “I reached out to Dr. Rob Jones, the aquarium vet, and he identified the growths as eggs. We have no male ray. He said there have been few cases of parthenogenesis in rays.”