Pictures from the past: Stingrays

I am having one of these days where my brain doesn’t seem capable of finishing a thought properly. I have started to posts in the past 24 hours and after the first few lines I get stuck.So instead I decided to look at an old memory card I found this week. I found all our Sri Lanka pictures and then I found stingrays.

Rays, with sharks, are my favorite fish. I find them beautiful and intriguing. They are cousins by the way: somewhere a long the line one got rounder and the other flatter.

When we lived in the Maldives we visited quite a few islands – for different reasons, sometimes because husband had a meeting or because the plane schedules were particularly bad or maybe there was a storm and the sea planes were grounded. Once on such occasion we went to Huvafen Fushi, a beautiful small resort in North Ari Atoll.

source: kiwicollection.com

I know I have pictures of the resort somewhere, but apparently not on that memory card, however I have pictures of kiddos 1, going brave with the stingrays.

These pictures are from sept 2015. At that time the rays were ‘residents’ at the resort and would come in for a sunset feed every day. Now I don’t particularly agree with feeding wild animals, simply because it changes the animals behaviours; however, they seemed happy enough and obviously it is something guests love.

In the beginning Kiddos 1 wasn’t too sure, but after a while she walked out in the water. There was one of the dive instructors there with us to ensure the animals were well treated.

The good thing about such an exercise is that you get to learn lots of things about the animals. The most important being about the sting, of course. The sting (or the barb) is not located at the end of the tail as you might expect, but much much higher up, on this particular type maybe 8-10cm (3-4inches) from the body. Also the stingray only has one, it doesn’t grow back out, so they are not going to use it unless they really feel in danger. Once they have used it they will never be able to defend themselves again. Just don’t step on them, or pull their tail and in most cases they should be ok – but it is a wild animal and deserves respect. I have been far too close to them for my comfort during a dive – but that’s a story for another day.