14: Botfly & Cownose Ray
Christian: Hey everyone, this is Christian Weatherford.
Ellen: And this is Ellen Weatherford.
Christian: And you're listening to Just the Zoo of Us, a podcast where we rate your favorite animals, our favorite animals...
Ellen: Your mom's favorite animals.
Christian: Especially hers.
Ellen: Our mom's favorite animals!
Christian: Each animal we review on the show, we will rate out of 10 based on three categories: effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics.
Ellen: And a quick structural note to make, we talked about this the other day: up until now we've been compiling all three of those scores into an overall score and, um, we're not going to do that anymore.
Christian: Yup. Average of arbitrary was not great, I guess.
Ellen: Well, we were factoring the aesthetic score in with the effectiveness and ingenuity score, which was fun and comprehensive, but unfair. Honestly, we're a new podcast. We're only on episode 14, so we're learning a little bit more each time, we're getting a little bit better as we go. So thank you for staying with us on this journey.
Christian: Yay! We are not zoological experts. We do a lot of research and we try our best to make sure we're presenting information from trustworthy sources. So if we get it wrong...
Ellen: Call us out. We'll fix it.
Christian: Along with your feedback in general.
Ellen: Oh yeah, please do. Let us know what you think. I thrive on validation. I really just, I do it all for the gram basically.
Christian: Even if it's fury over the lack of an average.
Ellen: Oh, please don't tell me bad things. Please give me all of the feedback as long as it's positive. Thank you.
Christian: (It's okay, you can send the bad stuff to me.)
Ellen: Yeah. Send all of your negative- send all of your criticism directly to Christian Weatherford. Thank you.
Christian: Okay. So...
Ellen: So last week I went first, which means that Christian, it is your turn to go first.
Christian: All right. I'm going to just apologize to everyone ahead of time.
Ellen: What could possibly warrant such a foreword?
Christian: I feel like this might even warrant a trigger warning. Maybe? I don't know.
Ellen: What are we working with here?
Christian: All right, so this week...
Ellen: Let's hear it.
Christian: I chose to go with the human botfly.
Ellen: There it is. Slam dunk.
Christian: So lots of folks are familiar with botflies in general. That is actually a term for a family of different flies that do roughly the same thing. I chose this one though. The specific species, human botfly scientific name, Dermatobia Hominis.
Ellen: I don't like those prefixes.
Christian: Yep. So, uh, in terms of Latin words in there, you'll see the word for skin.
Ellen: Yep. Saw that one.
Christian: And then also human or of human, I should say.
Ellen: Yeah. Noticed that.
Christian: The other part is life. I dunno. Maybe it's... Lives in skin of human.
Ellen: Lives in human skin. Great. We're off to a fantastic start.
Christian: So getting into it, I'm getting my information from two sources.
Ellen: Hell.
Christian: The first one being an article titled Human Botfly, hosted on the website of UF's (that is the University of Florida's) Entomology and nematology department found it entnemdept.ufl.edu.
Ellen: Cool.
Christian: The second one being from animaldiversity.org. So let's talk about some basic facts of the human botfly. So first of all, their adult size is 12 to 18 millimeters long. That's around half an inch. Pretty big fly, yeah?
Ellen: Is it?
Christian: I think so. Yeah.
Ellen: Half an inch? That's, what, fingernail size maybe?
Christian: Bee size, I'd say. A smaller bee, I'd say. This one is located, so it is naturally found in Mexico all the way south to Paraguay and northeast Argentina, so that is southern North America all the way to almost all of South America.
Ellen: My heart goes out to the people that live in the area affected by this animal.
Christian: Yes, yes. Notable evolutionary relatives. Other cursed botflies. As I mentioned earlier, there are many different species that are similar. Now, normally I would go category by category, kind of putting things in each category, but I feel like for this I have to talk about the full picture first and then I'll just kind of place them into the categories.
Ellen: This is a high concept animal.
Christian: Yup.
Ellen: There's a lot to process.
Christian: So let's start from the beginning.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: You have a female adult human botfly and she wants to lay her eggs.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: Here's where she does it.
Ellen: Don't. Don't do this to me.
Christian: So, you might be thinking they might lay eggs on people directly.
Ellen: Sure. Makes Sense.
Christian: Not the case. They are too big. You'd probably notice them. Here's what they do. They lay their eggs on biting insects, like mosquitoes.
Ellen: Ohhhh. That sneaky.
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: That's a low blow.
Christian: So these adult flies, female flies will catch things like mosquitoes in mid air while flying.
Ellen: Catch them?!
Christian: Catches them, and then lays eggs on them. So, now you've got a mosquito with eggs affixed to it.
Ellen: Sure. And she just like lets it go? Like unleashes it into the world?
Christian: Yep. Go on now.
Ellen: She's now weaponized a mosquito more than it already was.
Christian: So we have this egg on a mosquito. Now that mosquito, doing what mosquitoes do, will go find usually a warm blooded animal.
Ellen: That's their thing.
Christian: To go feed on.
Ellen: That's what they do.
Christian: Let's say a human in this case, to paint that carnal picture.
Ellen: Great.
Christian: Finds a human, lands, starts feeding. This causes a temperature rise of the mosquito, which the egg responds to by hatching.
Ellen: It's- oh, so it's hatching now?
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: So egg hatches larva falls to the surface of the mammal and then the mosquito flies away.
Ellen: Bye, not my problem anymore. You handle this.
Christian: The next step, the larva crawls its way into the bite wound.
Ellen: Hate it. Hate that it's doing that.
Christian: And in some other cases it can find its way into hair follicles.
Ellen: Eugh.
Christian: Yes. But for this scenario, let's say the bite wound. So it crawls into this bite wound and starts to grow getting bigger....
Ellen: I don't like it.
Christian: And uglier, into a bigger larva stage.
Ellen: *sounds of distress*
Christian: So as it gets bigger it is eating tissue. It has to breathe through that hole in the skin.
Ellen: No, it doesn't. Stop it.
Christian: So it has the breathing, I guess hole at the, at the end of it, close to the, to the skin...
Ellen: A snorkel. Sure. A meat snorkel.
Christian: And it has to breathe. Like it takes air from outside as it I guess eats... You.
Ellen: Great.
Christian: It's awful.
Ellen: Love it...
Christian: And they get bigger, they get bigger, they grow spines. That makes them difficult to fall out or pull out
Ellen: Wait. Spines as in like... spikes?
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Like... barbs?
Christian: Around its body. Yes.
Ellen: Oh No.
Christian: Yes. For the purpose of not falling out or being difficult to pull out.
Ellen: Oh dear.
Christian: And then when they get to a particular point, they themselves choose to exit and just fall to the ground.
Ellen: On their own terms. Sure. Yeah. It's their time now.
Christian: Yup. From there they'll pupate and then eventually you turn into another adult fly.
Ellen: Great.
Christian: The circle of awful!
Ellen: I hate it so much! Why are you doing this to me?
Christian: It's pretty bad.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah.
Christian: So, so while this one is called the human botfly, it doesn't just do humans. It does, you know, domestic animals or even wild animals. Well, I guess this one has a particular association with run ins with people.
Ellen: Glad to know nobody's safe.
Christian: It's awful. So yeah. Um...
Ellen: Can we start over?
Christian: This week, Christian has nothing.
Ellen: Sorry guys. Christian didn't come up with any notes this week. Hate how that happened. Anyway, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip.
Christian: So, uh, you can go on Youtube- not you specifically, but people in general can go on to YouTube to see videos of people getting these pulled out.
Ellen: WHY?
Christian: So this is along the same vein as you know, pimples being popped...
Ellen: Is it the same vein though?
Christian: It's the same. I'm telling you.
Ellen: Is it the same???
Christian: I know this because I've watched one of these videos and it took me down a rabbit hole of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, that suggested "next" thing.
Ellen: Is that what you've been doing this whole time?
Christian: Yeah, that's where I was um... emoji vomiting.
Ellen: Oh yeah. Uh, I was working late this evening and uh, Christian was doing his notes while I was working late and Christian was basically sending distress signals to me over messenger while doing his notes.
Christian: I have made a mistake, but I am too devoted to this podcast to turn back now.
Ellen: I know, he's really committing to the bit. Way past reason.
Christian: Yeah. So if you want to see what these things look like, uh, proceed with caution.
Ellen: I don't recommend it.
Christian: So now I'm going to get into our actual categories.
Ellen: Great. Can't wait.
Christian: Effectiveness. So this is how good do they do the things they do. So these are like, natural adaptations and that sort of thing.
Ellen: Sure.
Christian: I'm giving them a 6 out of 10.
Ellen: That's, like, okay.
Christian: So they're very well equipped to do their whole life cycle.
Ellen: Yeah.
Christian: Except when they choose a human.
Ellen: When they choose a human?
Christian: Yeah. And this is because with animals, like other animals, you know, they don't have a way to remove them. Right?
Ellen: Right.
Christian: But with humans we do.
Ellen: True.
Christian: We have the intelligence and the tool use capability to remove them.
Ellen: Yeah.
Christian: So we counter them pretty hard.
Ellen: Yeah. I guess they did choose a not a great target, right?
Christian: Yeah, but again, humans are not the only ones. This species uses it. It's just the, yeah-
Ellen: Well, I guess if they're really relying on mosquitoes as their deployment mechanism, they're not really choosing the human.
Christian: That's true...
Ellen: It's really the mosquito that's choosing the victim.
Christian: That's true. So I guess it's not really this species of botfly that's choosing the humans. It's whatever species of mosquito that are most used by this species. That's interesting.
Ellen: Yeah, like the mosquito is one that's picking the victim. The botfly really just leaves it up to the mosquito to choose, which is honestly a dumb move. Mosquitoes are not bright.
Christian: I wonder if the botfly is smart enough to pick the female mosquitoes. Right? Because the females are the ones that bite.
Ellen: I would have to assume because otherwise why bother? Yeah, right. Like, but I dunno, they put way too much trust in mosquitoes to make a good call. They're just putting entirely too much faith in a really dumb bug.
Christian: I'm not stealthy enough. You are. Go, go get them.
Ellen: This is the party sending the druid in on a stealth mission because they can wild shade into a spider.
Christian: So yeah, 6 out of 10 effectiveness. Ingenuity is the next category. This is the one where, you know, how do they do smart things like using tools, making plans, scheming.
Ellen: I mean this whole thing kind of sounds like...
Christian: Yeah. So again, another 6 out of 10 here.
Ellen: Kind of sounds like a just a massive evil plot.
Christian: Yeah. So kind of going back to that, laying eggs on biting insects thing. I think that's a pretty good point there for ingenuity.
Ellen: Right. Cause it's like I'm too big, so I have to let somebody a little more sneaky than me do my bidding for me.
Christian: And then how the eggs know to hatch when it senses the temperature change that correlates with the mosquito feeding.
Ellen: I have to imagine that's maybe something built into the egg physically.
Christian: Probably, yes.
Ellen: Like a heat activated...
Christian: Yeah. I think fleas do something similar.
Ellen: Oh yeah. Where they're like activated by heat.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Something like that.
Christian: Aw, I hate fleas too.
Ellen: Yeah, I know. Thanks for the unsettling content. This is a challenging episode for me.
Christian: So for aesthetics, which is our last one...
Ellen: Oh boy, bring it home.
Christian: I have two different scores.
Ellen: We really need to break this one down.
Christian: So first one is for the adults, I give a 3 out of 10 for adults.
Ellen: Perfect. That's probably the best they could have hoped for.
Christian: That's because as an adult they have a yellow face, a metallic blue abdomen and orange legs, and each body segment is covered in hairs and all of this combined makes them look like a bumblebee.
Ellen: That's not that bad. Bumblebees are kind of cute.
Christian: Yeah, but not quite right? So something that's kind of offsetting about these guys in their adult form, they don't have any mouthparts.
Ellen: Any?
Christian: They don't feed as adults.
Ellen: What?
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: How do they stay alive?
Christian: They don't.
Ellen: What!!
Christian: Or at least that's my assumption.I'm kind of deriving that, The only fact I saw is that they don't have mouth parts as adults and they also don't feed as adults.
Ellen: That's gotta be like a massive effectiveness deduction. That's gotta be a big knock, right? Once you're like alive, once you're like an adult and alive, you just immediately die.
Christian: Well I think that's pretty common in insects, actually, where you know, the adult form doesn't eat and that form is purely just to reproduce and that's it.
Ellen: Oh, you know what Luna moths are like that.
Christian: Yeah. Um, so yeah, 3 out of 10 for the adult form. For the larva form, specifically the one that you'll find in your skin, 0.
Ellen: Thank you!
Christian: I believe this marks the first zero of the show.
Ellen: This is our first zero.
Christian: And if, you know folks at home, if you go look for a picture of the larva of these things, I think you'll agree with me.
Ellen: I think that the context in which you would see the botfly larva itself warrants a negative score, in fact, I would say because it's just such a... A nauseating sort of experience to observe.
Christian: Yeah. But even without the context, they're not...
Ellen: Yeah, by themselves, they're not cute.
Christian: Especially the little spines that I mentioned earlier.
Ellen: That just makes it so much worse.
Christian: I described them as little flesh drills, is what they look like.
Ellen: Can I delete you saying that? The problem is, I could cut you saying that out of the audio recording of this podcast, but I would still know that you said it. I would still have flesh drills in my brain.
Christian: Yup.
Ellen: So, thank you for that.
Christian: Um, some miscellaneous info...
Ellen: Yeah. I really need to learn more about these.
Christian: Conservation status...
Ellen: Oh my god
Christian: I tried here. So, in every system that tracks conservation status, they have no special status.
Ellen: Why bother?
Christian: Which I assume to mean probably too many.
Ellen: Yes. Any amount of them is too many. They have to be stopped.
Christian: And my final little fact about these guys is how they're usually removed by humans. So earlier I mentioned they need to breathe. So most treatments involve depriving them of the ability to breathe.
Ellen: Sure.
Christian: So that could involve putting in some sort of adhesive over the skin over, you know, where it's at, or even using petroleum jelly, that sort of thing.
Ellen: Doesn't that just, I mean, that would just kill it, right? Or would it actually like, move? Would it like, leave?
Christian: Oh, no. Um, well...
Ellen: Will that kill it and then you just have to take out the dead larva?
Christian: Yeah, basically. Yeah, yeah. So that'll kill it after about a day. And then they'll use tweezers, uh, or maybe even more surgical procedure to make the hole a little bit bigger. The danger there is infection.
Ellen: I mean, you've already got a botfly in you, like you can't get any lower than that. That's- you're already at rock bottom.
Christian: It's rough.
Ellen: You can't experience anything worse than that. I'm sorry.
Christian: So these can be especially harmful in cattle in the range that we're talking about. So you could find a cow with literally thousands.
Ellen: No.
Christian: Literally thousands.
Ellen: Nope, no. No. I'm deleting this whole episode. I can't.
Christian: It's bad. Yeah. And then so when we're talking about cattle, then it's ruined. Like they can't butcher that.
Ellen: Right?
Christian: The hide is useless...
Ellen: Yeah.
Christian: With all of these holes in it.
Ellen: Here's my thought. Have a decoy cattle. Have one cow that is just covered in botflies and you just write that cow off as a loss and then keep the rest of your cows botfly free.
Christian: Yeah. Yeah. So it's rough. Um, yeah. Cattle, dogs, cats, primates, not good. So if you ever find yourself in Central or South America, best to wear protective clothing and insect repellent.
Ellen: You want to know something funny I've heard about these dudes?
Christian: What's that?
Ellen: There is a RadioLab episode that has a segment about a person who gets a botfly larva, um, in their head. On like, on their head under their hair and they discuss some kind of home remedies for the botfly larva. And one of the things that they mentioned is talked about as kind of like how you mentioned a common way to take care of botfly larva is to suffocate them, a lot of people will sort of prescribe applying meat to... where the- to the larval site and kind of like, holding a piece of meat, like raw meat over the site where the larva is. Because not only will it, it blocks off the larva as air source, but also they will tunnel out through and like attach themselves to that meat instead of your muscle.
Christian: See, I have a hard time imagining that because basically again, flesh drill where one end is mouth and the other end is breathing tube.
Ellen: Yeah... I guess they're not really great at going in reverse. Right?
Christian: Yeah, they would have to- Well, I guess they could just shimmy their way out, and then go back up I guess? I don't know.
Ellen: They could just wiggle their way out. I hate that a lot though. I hate that I said that,
Christian: Which reminded me, you talking about this reminds me, so the part about where you're suffocating them only works in accessible parts of the body. Now these guys could get into some not so accessible parts of the body... Like your eyelids.
Ellen: We're not going there.
Christian: Yup.
Ellen: We're not doing that. We're not doing that.
Christian: So there are more specialized ways to get them out when it's just a part of the body where you just don't have a way to do that suffocation. I'm going to stop talking about the botfly now.
Ellen: I wish you had said that, uh, 20 minutes ago. No sweeter words have you ever spoken to me.
Christian: So, to review their score: effectiveness, 6 out of 10. Ingenuity, 6 out of 10. Aesthetics, I'm going to say 0 out of 10.
Ellen: Very bad. Bad all around. Congratulations babe. This is the worst animal.
Christian: *sad trumpet sound*
Ellen: We did it! We found the worst one. Podcast over.
Christian: We got it out of the way.
Ellen: Yeah. This, you know what though? This is kind of the gold standard. This is now our floor, right? Like this is as bad as an animal can get. It cannot get worse than this. This is our zero.
Christian: So hun, um, what animal do you have this week that will lift our spirits?
Ellen: Yeah. Thanks for really decimating the vibe of everything. So this week, I have something way more pleasant to talk about than the botfly.
Christian: Yay!
Ellen: So that's probably a good thing.
Christian: Is it two botflies?
Ellen: That's twice as bad! Well I guess 2 times 0 is still 0, right?
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah... No. This week. I'm going to talk to you about the cownose stingray.
Christian: Ooh!
Ellen: Yes. This is the, the scientific name is Rhinoptera bonasus, the species was submitted to us by Myranda Love, one of our listeners.
Christian: Thanks Myranda.
Ellen: Thank you Myranda! So I'm getting my information about the cownose ray from the Jacksonville Zoo...
Christian: Yesss.
Ellen: Where you can see very many of them and you can touch and pet them and they're delightful, also from the Florida Museum and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Who by the way, if you don't follow the Monterey Bay Aquarium on social media, you're wasting your time because the Monterey Bay Aquarium social media presence is phenomenal. They posted something today about shark week, and it was like, one of those emoji... Like it was like, a dude made out of emojis, but all the emojis were sharks.
Christian: Very good.
Ellen: Yeah, it was really funny. But so yeah, Monterey Bay Aquarium is pretty much my favorite ever. I have never been there, but I am a huge fan because of their social media presence.
Christian: We'll have to visit there sometime.
Ellen: We will. That's on the bucket list. Anyway, the cownose ray. If you've never seen a stingray before, a stingray is shaped like a diamond. Or square, really. It has triangular wings across the side of its body, has a long rigid tail trailing behind. Now the cownose ray is either brown or gray on top and they're white on the bottom, and they have a really distinctive face that sets them apart from other stingrays. You can tell that it's a cownose ray by the fact that it has these two lobes along the front edge, where you would consider his face to be, basically between the eyes giving it the appearance of having like an indented nose.
Christian: Aww.
Ellen: Yeah, that's why they call it the cownose ray, is because it has that little, it looks like the emoticon... colon and then the number 3 (:3). You know, like the little cute face emoticon?.That's what it looks like, but now that can be a little bit confusing because to us we're usually looking at it from above and that looks like it's like nose, where its mouth would be, and it's not. That's just like the front edge of its body. Yeah. So these cownose rays are, they get up to 3 feet or 0.9 meters long.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah, they're, they're decent size. For stingray actually, they're kind of a little bit small but um...
Christian: Is that 3 feet from like nose to tail?
Ellen: Oh sorry. No, that's their wingspan. Well, their wingspan referring to from one side to the other. So about three feet across. It's a decent size, but it's not the biggest, it's a little bit on the small side for a stingray.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Uh, you're gonna find these in the Atlantic Ocean, usually in more like kind of shallow water. You're probably not going to find them like way, way, way out there. You'll find them a little bit closer to the shore and in salty or brackish water. One of the areas where you're likely to find them is in the Chesapeake Bay, but I'll, I'll kind of talk about their location a little bit cause that's actually kind of interesting. Their taxanomic family is called Myliobatidae, this is a family of stingrays called the eagle rays. Yeah. So there are 220 different species of stingrays.
Christian: That's a lot.
Ellen: Yeah, very many of them. So it belongs to this one particular family called eagle rays, and stingrays are more closely related to sharks than like other fish.
Christian: I could see that.
Ellen: Sharks are their closest relatives. So like sharks, they have a cartilage like, skeletal system. It's not a skeleton the way we think of it because it's mostly just made of cartilage, similar to sharks in some ways. So I'm going to get into my rating for effectiveness, which by the way, I don't know if you mentioned it earlier cause you kind of played around with the format a little bit, but effectiveness we typically define as the physical adaptations that an animal has that allow it to do the things it's trying to do a little bit better. So for the cownose ray, I'm giving it an effectiveness rating of 6 out of 10. it's okay. It's okay. So cownose rays are always on the lookout for mollusks, crustaceans, snails, things like that. So the way that they detect prey is kind of interesting. They have a couple of different ways. We actually, you mentioned in your segment on the goblin shark, the ampullae of Lorenzini.
Christian: Yeah!
Ellen: So this is a trait that sharks and stingrays have, so the cownose rays do have these as well. These are electro receptors, so cells that are sensitive to electric fields, and those cells detect vibrations in the water, which alerts them to the movement of both prey and predators.
Christian: Very good.
Ellen: So they kind of have a grasp on what's going on around them because of these electro receptors. Now these electrical receptors are so sensitive that sting rays can detect the heartbeat of clams under the sand.
Christian: Wow!
Ellen: Yeah, extremely sensitive. So they're very good at seeing those things. They also have a really strong sense of smell, so they can smell their prey that's hiding under the sand or anything like that. And once they've detected the presence of their prey, they will use their nose and their pectoral fins to dig into the sand and kick the sand up, stir it up a little bit and reveal the mollusks underneath.
Ellen: Now, once they've found their prey, what they do is they suck it up into their mouth. Now when you're looking at it from above, you might be inclined to assume that the mouth is along the front of the stingray, because I don't know, that's just what I always assumed. But their mouth is actually on the bottom of the stingray. Probably a little bit close to the middle of the sting ray. So they suck the prey up into their mouth on the bottom of them. And they're actually, while they're doing that, they're filtering sediment out through their gills. So they're bringing everything in, but they're pushing like, sand and rocks and stuff back out through their gills.
Christian: That's smart.
Ellen: Yep. And then what they do is they, so they're filtering out food from non food. Once they've got their food narrowed down, they crushed the mollusks with their specialized teeth and spit out the crushed bits of shell. So now I want to talk about stingray teeth, because I guess I knew that they had teeth, but I didn't really get what was going on in there.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So I looked it up a little bit and it's wild. It is crazy. So their teeth don't look like what you would imagine when you think of teeth. Usually when you think of teeth you think of like, little bony protrusions, right?
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: Little bits that stick out that you can use to chew things. Theirs don't look like that at all. So rather than having teeth the way we think of them, each of their jaws has a dental plate lined with 11 to 13 rows of teeth. Now these teeth are shaped like tiles. They're flat and they're wide and they're geometrically shaped. So the ones in the middle of the row are very long and they're hexagons. But as they go out towards the edge of the row, they decrease in the number of sides. So the ones in the middle are hexagons. The ones closer to the edge are pentagons. And then the ones on the outside are tetragons or squares. They're squares. So it's, it's actually really, really cool. Like, look up a picture of stingray teeth.
Christian: Like right now?
Ellen: No, not right now.
Christian: But I kinda wanna.
Ellen: Okay, well if you're listening, yes. But you're doing the podcast right now, so no.
Christian: Aw beans!
Ellen: Sorry. You can do it later.
Christian: Yesss.
Ellen: So yeah, their teeth look like a set of tiles along these plates and the stingray basically just mashes those plates together and those tile teeth, uh, just crush the shells to bits.
Christian: That's pretty cool.
Ellen: Yeah, it is really cool! I hadn't thought about, I guess I'd never really thought about what their teeth must look like. I knew they had teeth, but I didn't really know what they were all about. So very interesting that they have adapted their teeth in that way. So other than how they eat their prey, they have to defend themselves somehow. Like other stingrays, the cownose ray has a barbed spine on their tail and they can use that to defend themselves with a really painful sting. So luckily they usually swim pretty close to the surface of the water, which is kind of surprising since they are bottom feeders, they have to eat on the bottom, but they actually, when they're not feeding, they like to swim on the top. So that minimizes their risk of being stepped on. And also the fact that the spine lays flat along the base of the tail makes it really unlikely that you're going to accidentally touch it or get, um, unexpectedly stung by this particular stingray. The stinger is like attached to their body.
Christian: So does it have venom or...
Ellen: Yes, it does. So the stinger does actually produce a venom, and that venom makes their sting extremely painful. But it's typically not fatal to humans. Yeah, it's really just to make you not want to mess with them so bad. They will actually only sting when they're harassed. So you kind of have to really try to get this thing to sting you. They typically won't. But something else that's interesting is that that stinger, it can be broken off, but it regrows. It regrows over time, kind of like human fingernails. Yeah, it's very similar to human fingernails. I took a couple of points off, you know, for the fact that their stinger limits their defense capabilities a little bit. There's not a ton they can do with their stinger cause it's like attached to their body. It's pretty small. It's just not a whole lot there. They're kind of easy pickings for like, sharks and cobia and stuff like that. But I also took a couple of points off of their effectiveness because their populations are really, really fragile, and this is because their population grows very slowly. So each stingray only has one offspring per year. Just one, one baby. And each baby stingray takes a really long time to reach sexual maturity. So it can take 5 to 7 years for a stingray to become an adult. Yeah. So it takes a very, very, very long time for their population to grow. And that means that they're very vulnerable and kind of fragile. It takes a lot for them to recover from any sort of like, particular hit to their numbers. So that's my 6 out of 10 for their effectiveness.
Christian: Very cool.
Ellen: Now for ingenuity, I gave them, I actually gave them a 7 out of 10, which is higher than I expected to give a stingray, but I gave them a 7 out of 10 because they are migratory stingrays. They migrate. So cownose rays group up into schools of thousands at a time. So thousands of these cownose rays all get together and they swim north in the late spring and then in the late fall they swim back south when it starts to get chilly. They like the warm water, so they'll swim up north when it's summertime and it's kind of warm. But then when it starts to get cold, they come down south where the waters are still warm. So I was wondering why don't they just stay, if they like it warm, why don't they just stay in the south where it's warm pretty much all the time. Right? The reason that they do that is because their nursery habitat where they give birth to their pups is in the Chesapeake Bay.
Christian: Aww.
Ellen: The Chesapeake Bay is in the Maryland and Virginia sort of area, up north. So really, really cool. You can see pictures and videos of the schools of just thousands of stingrays coming into the Chesapeake Bay to have their babies. And boy, it's beautiful. It's a heavily photographed affair. So, yeah, that's, that's kind of why I gave them a pretty good effectiveness score because they migrate to stay with warm water and they have like a particular place where they like to lay their pups, but then they come back down to keep up with the seasons. Um, it's been said that also like the angle of the sun is a factor in when they decide to switch, but I don't know, they just like warm water and they like to follow it where it goes.
Christian: Do they do live birth or is it a an egg of some sort?
Ellen: Yeah, they do give birth to live young, so it's very cute. That brings me to aesthetics. I also actually gave them two scores, so I gave them 8 out of 10 when you're above them looking down. Now when you're below them looking up, different story.
Christian: It's like a selfie from a very low angle.
Ellen: Yeah. It's your myspace angle. They really have like a flattering, they have like a flattering side. So if you're looking, if you're above them and you're looking down, which honestly we most likely are...
Christian: Usually, yeah.
Ellen: If they're swimming in the water, if you're above them looking down, they're so cute. They're just, they have that little smiley face and- well, what you would interpret to be its face when you're above it, they just have a cute little smile and they're so sweet and they got their little flappy wings and they're just precious. But when you're below them and you're looking up at them? Mm-mm. No. You can see like its mouth is actually in a really strange spot, and it's very like bumpy and weird looking from the bottom. So 3 out of 10 from below. Yeah, from when you're below and you're looking up they're kind of grotesque. I don't think they're cute at all from that angle.
Christian: I think most people will see them at this angle in aquariums when they're like, swimming up against the glass and that kind of thing.
Ellen: Yeah, yeah. This is where you would see them. So I don't think they're that cute when they're doing that. But when you're looking out at them, when you're looking down on them from above, they're very cute. So yeah, just to recap, that is a 6 out of 10 for effectiveness, a 7 out of 10 for ingenuity, and I'm going to go with the higher one, 8 out of 10 for aesthetics. This is a cute little guy. So that brings us to their conservation status. They are near threatened. They're not threatened, but they're near it.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So as mentioned previously, they have a really long turnaround time on reproduction that makes them really vulnerable to overfishing. It's very easy to like, fish too many of them. And then they have a hard time recovering from that. However, right now their populations are believed to be increasing.
Christian: That's good.
Ellen: There are more, there are becoming more of them over time. And this is believed to be due to the decrease in populations of sharks, which prey on stingrays. So the increase in stingray populations was thought to be harming oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay, and they were kind of worried that there were too many stingrays and the stingrays were eating all the oysters, which of course are a big thing in that area.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: Um, for economic reasons. And it's just a, a big thing people eat up there. But actually whether the oysters were declining because of the stingrays is still kind of up for debate. People are kinda like, eh, I don't think it was because of the stingrays. So cownose ray populations are actually climbing right now.
Christian: Well good for them.
Ellen: Yeah, there they are still though very, you know, fragile and susceptible to changes like overfishing. So still be careful with them, but their numbers are doing okay right now. They're doing pretty good.
Christian: So, do people eat them, I wonder?
Ellen: Yeah. You can eat them. I mean, I probably wouldn't recommend it.
Christian: I mean, I'd try it, I guess.
Ellen: I mean you can, but it's not like popular. It's not, I don't, I dunno. It's probably, I probably would hate it...
Christian: Well, yeah.
Ellen: But I hate seafood. So, I mean that just goes without saying. Despite the fact that they have a really, really painful sting, cownose rays are a really popular choice for interactive exhibits at zoos and aquariums. These are usually touch tanks where guests are allowed to come up and feed and pet the stingrays. So cownose rays are a really popular choice for those, first of all, because they're really, really cute. They're so cute. But second of all, because they're actually very docile. Even like in the wild, they're kind of shy. They're really don't want too much to do with people, but it takes a lot to agitate them. They're very chill. They're very cool animals. They have a good personality.
Christian: So in touch tanks though, their stinger is trimmed? Is that how they do it?
Ellen: Yes. So the stinger can be clipped off. So I was wondering, I had seen this information floating around that the stingray's stinger gets removed so that the guests don't get stung by the sting ray, and I knew that the stinger would grow back, but I wasn't really sure how long that takes or how often that is. So I asked my friend, Amy, who has experience working at a zoo, how often they clip their stingrays stingers and she said that, just like our fingernails, they grow at different rates for each particular stingray. Some grow back quicker than others, but typically it's every couple of weeks.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: Yeah, every few weeks or so each stingray will need to have its stinger re-clipped.
Christian: Wonder how that process goes.
Ellen: Amy says they trim them with dog nail trimmers.
Christian: Aw!
Ellen: Yeah. So the same sort of device that you'd use to trim a dog's nail. Which makes sense. It's, I guess a similar shape. It's like a, it doesn't have that curved shape that a dog's nail has to it, but it's like a, yeah. It just makes sense. Although if it makes you feel any better about it, there's no like nerve endings in there or anything. It doesn't hurt them.
Christian: That's good.
Ellen: Yeah. It's not painful to them. They probably don't love being like handled and like probably I would imagine they have to like hold them down in some capacity and they probably don't love that...
Christian: They probably just net 'em. Like they just, like, pull them out with a net?
Ellen: Now we have seen, uh, it wasn't a cownose ray, but you remember at the aquarium in Epcot we saw them training the stingrays to go to points.
Christian: Oh, yeah!
Ellen: Remember that? The trainer would be underwater in a dive suit and would have this giant like... Looked like a dry erase board or something. It was just like a giant plastic sign basically. And it had a big orange circle on it and the stingray was trained to swim onto that circle and stay there so that the trainer could like do observations, check on it, see everything going okay. So we have seen stingrays that have been trained to go to points and stay on the point. So they have that on our Overwatch teammates, who apparently cannot be trained to stay on a point.
Christian: I don't know how I didn't see that burn coming.
Ellen: Anyway. Yeah. So we have seen stingrays that were trained to behave, so I would imagine they probably do something similar for the cownose, just like have them trained to stay in a particular spot so they can clip their stinger.
Christian: I don't know because, you know, touch tanks, you know, are much, much smaller than that kind of aquarium. But I don't know, maybe.
Ellen: Yeah. But I would imagine they probably have like another area where they can take them to, that's not part of the touch tank.
Christian: I dunno.
Ellen: I'm not sure. Well anyway, they're very, very commonly seen in if you have a local zoo or aquarium near you that has a touch tank, you can probably go there and see a cownose ray because they're very popular in those.
Christian: And give them a scritch! They seem to like it.
Ellen: Yeah, yeah! So we have probably quite a few times pet stingrays in different touch tanks all over the place and they have really delightful little personalities. Some of them will even kind of circle around and like, they'll see where your hand is and so like they'll swim on the bottom and then when they get close to your hand they'll come up to the very top so that you can reach them, and they'll like put their little flap out of the water so that you can touch them easier. They actually kind of seem to enjoy it. I don't know if that's just me ascribing my own feelings to them, I might be anthropomorphizing them a little bit, but that's just...
Christian: Well, they're so cute.
Ellen: They're very cute. Very catlike, how like they, they will approach you for you to pet them, but like on their terms. So I also read something that said that a lot of times they'll jump out of the water and smack back down on the top of the water and that it's like a territorial display thing, or they could just be having fun. I don't know. Maybe they just having a good time.
Christian: Beavers do something similar.
Ellen: What, smack the water?
Christian: And it's scary when you're not expecting it!
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. So stingrays do this big belly flop. And it's really cute. Yeah. So that's my bit on the cownose stingray.
Christian: Thank you honey.
Ellen: You're welcome.
Christian: It's a much better one than mine!
Ellen: See, I've fixed us.
Christian: Alright, well next week, you get the bad ones.
Ellen: I've done some real clunkers. I don't know. After I thought the aye-aye was kind of creepy. It was a weird friend. Oh wait, you did the goblin shark. How come you keep picking all these weird ones?
Christian: I don't know, man!
Christian: Jeez, alright.
Christian: No one even picked this last one. I don't know what I was doing.
Christian: I know, you didn't even have to do this. You did this cause you wanted to, you sadist. All right, well that's all we've got for this week.
Christian: Yay!
Ellen: Um, I would like to go ahead and thank everybody who's been listening to the show and especially everybody who's been recommending us because we have seen a lot of growth over the last couple of weeks and that is really exciting to see. Um, you can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Just search the title of the show. You'll get there. I trust you. I believe that you can find us. I'm not going to rattle off every single social media handle we have, but, um, if you have an animal species you want to hear us review, you can submit those to us. Either messaging us on social media works, uh, you know, commenting or tagging us on social media works just fine. If you would like, you can email us at thezooofus@gmail.com. A transcript of this episode will be made available at justthezooofus.home.blog, and a final note here, I would like to thank Louie Zong for the use of his song "Adventuring" off of his album Bee Sides.
Christian: It's very good.
Ellen: It's excellent. Yup. So that's all I had for this week.
Christian: Well thank you, honey.
Ellen: Can I even say thank you to you? I can't cause I wish you hadn't done it.
Christian: All right, well thanks for listening everyone.
Ellen: Thank you so much for your time.
Christian: Bye!
Ellen: Byeeee!