Bank of America is proud to present one of the Zoo’s most popular attractions, Stingray Bay. Stingray Bay is making waves once again as our stingrays and sharks hang up their fins from their summer vacation and settle into their winter home here at the Phoenix Zoo.
Stingray Bay is an interactive experience that allows guests to get in touch with some of the oceans most amazing animals. With only a dip of your hands into the water, you can instantly become a part of the school.
The sharks are a little more shy and don't always offer the perfect opportunity for a touching experience, but they do become more available as they become comfortable with their surroundings.
The Horseshoe Crab
- The Southern Stingray
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The Cownose Stingray
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The Bamboo Shark
- The Nurse Shark
Stingray Bay Frequently Asked Questions
Stingray Bay Hours:
Jan. 12 – April, 2009
9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Admission is $1 for members and $3 for non-members!
Want a chance to feed the stingrays? Be sure to check in at Stingray Bay during feeding times and feed the stingrays’ yummy shrimp and fish.
Only $2 per feeding.
The Horseshoe Crab
This year, we have a new aquatic species – the horseshoe crab. Despite their size and intimidating appearance, horseshoe crabs are not dangerous. Their tails may look like a weapon, but are actually used to plow the crab through the sand and muck, to act as a rudder, and to help the crab flip over if it accidentally falls upside down.
Their hard, curved shells make made it difficult for predators to overturn them and expose their soft, vulnerable underbellies – a successful survival technique considering that they have evolved little in the last 250 million years. In the wild, horseshoe crabs can be found along the Delaware coast, the western shores of Atlantic coast, as well similar species on the coastlines of Japan and Indonesia. And don’t forget, you can visit them right here in Arizona, just stop on by to the Phoenix Zoo!
The
Southern Stingray
Southern rays are larger and more docile than cownose rays. During the day, these rays enjoy burying themselves in the sand to rest, and generally do their hunting for food in the evenings. Their eyes are located on top of their heads, so while resting in the sand they are still able to see what is going on around them. Their diets consist of small crustaceans, mollusks and fish. In the wild, they can be found all over including off the coasts of Florida, the Caribbean, as north as New Jersey shores, and as south as Brazil.
The
Cownose Stingray
The cownose rays are the most active rays in the experience tank. These animals often stay in large groups called schools and migrate together in long distances in the wild. They get their name from their unique forehead which resembles the nose of a cow. These animals are distantly related to sharks and enjoy temperate and tropical waters to depths of 72 feet. Like other rays, their mouths are located on the underneath side, so their food intake comes from bottom-dwelling animals such as shellfish, lobster and small crabs.
The
Bamboo Shark
You’ll see two species of sharks gliding along with the rays in Stingray Bay – one is the white-spotted bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium plagiosum). They have dark brown stripes on a lighter brown/gray background, and white spots. Males typically reach one to two feet long and females reach two to three feet long at adulthood. These bottom-dwelling sharks are found living on reefs in the Indo-West Pacific regions of Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Japan and the Philippines. They mainly feed at night on fish and crustaceans they find along the bottom. They have a small mouth, but powerful jaws with very sharp teeth that are arranged in rows, and are replaced when broken or lost from eating tough prey.
As mentioned earlier, females do not have live births, but lay eggs. Males have external arm like structures that look like fins called claspers used to fertilize the female. After she is fertilized, the female lays an egg case with a developing embryo shark inside which can take up to three months to hatch. Sounds pretty basic – reproductively speaking. How about this though – in the September 26, 2002 National Geographic New, an article reports that a female white-spotted bamboo shark that had been housed in a tank with a female brown banded bamboo shark for six years laid a clutch of eggs which gave birth to two babies without being fertilized by a male! These births were at the Belle Isle Aquarium and others have been reported elsewhere. Scientists are now questioning whether sharks may be able to reproduce without an egg being fertilized. In any case, the young sharks are approximately five inches long when they are born and there is no parental care once the eggs are laid.
The
Nurse Shark
The other shark you will see at Stingray Bay is the nurse shark, Ginglymostoma cirratum which is actually a mix of Greek and Latin and means "curled, hinged mouth" to describe this shark's appearance. The origin of the name "nurse shark" is unclear. It may come from the sucking sound they make when hunting for prey in the sand, which vaguely resembles that of a nursing baby. Or it may derive from an archaic word, nusse, meaning cat shark. The most likely theory though is that the name comes from the Old English word for sea-floor shark: hurse.
Nurse sharks are found in the warm, shallow waters of the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans, preferring coral reefs, salt flats and channels between mangrove islands. They are nocturnal, and will often rest on the sea floor during the day in groups of up to 40 sharks, sometimes piled on top of each other. As slow moving bottom-dwellers and are, for the most part, harmless to humans, they are easy to locate and study. They return to the same breeding ground each year, and the scientists in the Keys have been following them to study their mating behaviors. According to historical reports, however, the sharks have been around the area much longer than modern science. Breeding nurse sharks were reported in the same Keys mating grounds as early as 1860, and may have been there long before that time. This kind of patterned behavior provides a clue to understanding the sharks' mating processes, and the relationship that they have with the habitat itself.
Nurse sharks can be huge—up to 14 feet long. They have very strong jaws filled with thousands of tiny, serrated teeth. They use their strong jaws to crush and eat shellfish and even coral, but prefer to dine on fish, shrimp, and squid. Adult nurse sharks are typically light yellowish tan to dark gray/brown (some have a purple or orange sheen to their skin). The skin is smoother to the touch than most other sharks. They have a stout body and a wide head with two barbells (like you see with the bamboo sharks) extending from their upper lip which help them locate food on the ocean floor. They also have small openings, called spiracles, just behind their eyes which allow them to breathe more easily while resting on the bottom. Instead of sucking sandy water in through their gills, they can pull clear water in through the spiracles and then force it out through the gills. Nurse sharks have two rounded dorsal fins, with the first larger than the second.
