Stingrays recorded making sounds for the first time—but why is a mystery
New videos taken in Australia and Indonesia reveal at least two stingray species make clicking noises—but it's unknown how they do it.
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
