A close-up encounter with a stingray mouth
Last week we camped at Bendalong and I enjoyed a moment in the sea when a smooth stingray swam up close to check me out. All at once, I was reminded of an interesting scientific curiosity, an entertaining observation and a recurring question about how humans and non-humans regard one another.
In the early morning sun, I stood with our black labrador dog Dexter, my feet on a sandy bottom and the water around my shoulders. My arms were folded awkwardly underneath Dexter’s legs and our rib cages were moving against one another in unison as his breathing slowed after his snorty swim out to me. A brown shadow several metres long loomed up as we stood in the calm outside the gentle breakers. The smooth ray brought a flash of surprise as its undulating body upturned to white, it’s mouth and gills less than a foot from my face.
The teeth of a cownose stingray, Rhinoptera bonasus
I used to have an office opposite the Cambridge Museum of Zoology, which I would visit frequently and find myself drawn to a cabinet with sets of stingray teeth. I would marvel at the beautiful and intricate engineering involved in scavenging the ocean floor. The teeth of the cownose stingray resembled a conveyor belt of tic tac mints neatly lined up to rasp through sand and sift out prey.
Another fun thing about stingrays (and brace yourself for some major anthropomorphism) is the configuration of their gills and mouths. From underneath, stingrays look like cartoon faces. This made me giggle, once I recovered from the adrenaline surge of a huge one appearing unexpectedly in front of my face.
Standing there as the ray glided away through the water, I was left pondering what it thought of the human-holding-dog it had just encountered. Were we also a curious creature with interesting or amusing body parts? And what, for that matter, did Dexter think of the ray? In her book Vesper Flights, nature writer Helen Macdonald describes an encounter with a wild boar in a forest that momentarily realigns her relationship to nature. What have moments of interaction with nature inspired for you?