Stingray Essay

While sharks are perhaps the most well-known member of the taxonomic class elasmobranch, stingrays also represent a relatively large and important percentage of the phylum. Traditionally, however, this class of fish has largely been overlooked within the scientific community and the general population, resulting in the existence of little reliable information on these fish. With Caribbean islands moving increasingly towards a reliance on stingray populations to support their tourism industry, and the development of a pet trade centered on freshwater stingray populations, though, this gap in scientific knowledge and the drastic consequences that can accompany it are becoming increasingly exposed. For example, work with the Cayman Islands southern

The only prior social interaction research conducted is in reference to mating interactions, in which social groups, principally consisting of multiple males and a solitary female, represents the most commonly observed state (Deloach 1999). Outside of mating season, however, the presence of social interactions and what their particular nature may entail is currently unknown. Additionally, as with tiger stingray, work monitoring population density in the Atlantic stingray is also absent from scientific literature, however, unlike the Potamotrygondae family of stingrays, this gap of information does not extend to all members of family Dasyatidae. Work by Alexander Tilly and Samantha Strindberg (2012) on Dasyatis americana, a close cousin of the Atlantic stingray, found a population density for the rays of 245 individuals per square kilometer. In addition, they observed a non-homogenous spatial distribution of the stingray population, with high clustering in shallower water. Synthesizing these findings with our pilot observations, in which 21 interactions were recorded within a one hour, led us to hypothesize that we would find Atlantic stingrays to interact more frequently than the tiger stingray, at a rate of at least 15 interactions per hour. Additionally, as our pilot observations revealed interaction times frequently persisting less than three seconds in the Atlantic stingray population, we predicted that Atlantic stingray’s interaction durations would be less than that of the tiger stingrays, averaging under three seconds per