Stingrays recorded making sounds for the first time—but why is a mystery
Whales sing, shrimp snap, and toadfish hum. But the stingray? Until recently, scientists believed the flat fish to be quiet as a pancake.
Now, a study has broken that silence. Videos reveal that two species of stingray—the mangrove whipray (Urogymnus granulatus) and cowtail stingray (Pastinachus ater), both native to the Indo-West Pacific—produce striking, unmistakable clicks.
In fact, in one of the videos, the stingray’s click was so boisterous, it caused the photographer to drop his camera, says Lachlan Fetterplace, a marine ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who led the study, published recently in the journal Ecology.
While nearly a thousand species of bony fish make some sort of noise, sharks, rays, and skates had, until now, been thought of as silent outliers. And that’s surprising, because scientists and divers are in the water with these animals all the time.
“That’s kind of the strange thing,” Fetterplace says. “I dive a lot with some other species of rays, and now I’m second guessing myself. Could I have missed this?”
“This just shows we don’t know everything,” he adds. “We’re in the year 2022, and you can discover something no one has ever seen just by going out and doing observations in natural history.”
How does a stingray make a sound?
Before the new study, the only verified evidence of rays making sounds came from a study of captive cownose rays. Published in 1970, this research recorded short, sharp clicks coming from the fish, but only after scientists forcefully prodded them. It wasn’t until 2017 and 2018 that several of the new study’s co-authors happened to record high-quality video while diving in Indonesia and Australia that captured the noises.
Even though the video evidence these rays make noises seems to be a slam dunk, the researchers are not certain how the animals produce the sounds. Read More...
