Charlotte the Stingray Isn’t Pregnant After All

The curious case of Charlotte the stingray has come to an even more bizarre end, it seems. 

Earlier this week, we probed what might be going on with Charlotte, a resident of Hendersonville’s Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO who went viral earlier this year. 

Aquarium owner Brenda Ramer had announced that the California round stingray was pregnant and allegedly due to give birth any day. Charlotte had not encountered a male stingray in years, and the aquarium claimed that Charlotte had either undergone parthenogenesis or that the father was one of two bamboo sharks who shared her tank. Biologists had a lot of questions about that, and so did internet sleuths as weeks went by with no birth.

When reporter Emily Cataneo visited earlier this month, the aquarium staff called the police on her. Then its PR person told Cataneo earlier this week that Charlotte “has daily physical and visual exams” and that “multiple images have been taken and reviewed.” She did not answer questions like, “Have the aquarium vet or outside scientists examined her and tried to confirm what’s going on?” or “Could the aquarium have been wrong about the pregnancy?”

Then on Thursday evening, ECCO posted that Charlotte “has developed a rare reproductive disease that has negatively impacted her reproductive system.” They attributed the lack of updates over the past month to the time needed to “gather data and analyze lab and testing results.” That post did not mention Charlotte’s purported pregnancy.

Well, on Friday there was yet another update, via station WLOS–Charlotte is not pregnant, and that the aquarium has known this for at least a week.

“I can only tell you what we know for certain,” Ramer told the station. “I’ve never been a liar. This was not a scam. This was not anything made up, but people do that. People have their own thoughts.”

Meanwhile, aquarium vet Rob Jones told the Daily Mail that while he said Charlotte could be pregnant earlier this year, he never confirmed that she was. Jones, who is based in Australia, said he was only sent still ultrasound images that he thought showed eggs. “I asked if they had seen any movement in the ultrasound and did not get a reply,” Jones said.

Read The Assembly’s original story for more not just about Charlotte, but about the science and media frenzy around the case.