A stingray in the United States is pregnant, despite not sharing a tank with a male of her species for at least eight years.
Charlotte, who has spent much of her life at the Shark Laboratory and Aquarium in Hendersonville, North Carolina, is expected to give birth to up to four cubs in the next fortnight.
Experts have said it would have been impossible for him to mate with one of the five small sharks that share his tank.
The cause is parthenogenesis, a rare type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, something that can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not in mammals.
A female’s egg fuses with another cell, triggering cell division and leading to the creation of an embryo.
Charlotte, who has spent much of her life at the Shark Laboratory and Aquarium in Hendersonville, North Carolina, is expected to give birth to up to four cubs in the next fortnight.
One scientist said: “We should make it clear that there is no shark ray shenanigans going on here.”
Documented examples include California condors, Komodo dragons, and yellow-bellied water snakes.
Kady Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, said Charlotte’s pregnancy is the only documented example she knows of of round manta rays, although other types of sharks, skates and skates have had such pregnancies in human care.
“I’m not surprised, because nature finds a way for this to happen,” he said.
‘We don’t know why it happens. It’s just a really interesting phenomenon that they seem to be able to do.
“We should make it clear that there is no shark ray shenanigans going on here.”
Charlotte lives in a tank of about 2200 gallons.
Brenda Ramer, executive director of the lab that encourages children to get interested in science, said they hope to get a tank almost twice that size to accommodate their children and install live cameras.
He said lab staff first thought Charlotte had a tumor when they noticed a lump on her back that was “puffing up like a cookie” before an ultrasound revealed the pregnancy.
Lab staff first thought Charlotte had a tumor when they noticed a lump on her back that was “bloating up like a cookie” before an ultrasound revealed the pregnancy.
Mrs Ramer said: ‘We all said, ‘Close the back door’. There’s no way.’
‘We thought we were overfeeding her. But we were overfeeding her because she has more mouths to feed.
‘It’s very rare that it happens. But it’s happening in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in rural North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean.’