It's shuffle time

Hungry stingrays are swimming near shore. But don't fret. Just watch your step.

By AMY WIMMER

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

ST. PETE BEACH -- Michele Johnson, a tourist from Minneapolis, was playing in the surf last Saturday, happy to be on the water after a week in landlocked Orlando.

Then a dark shadow approached.

"Oh, my God, stingrays," she recalled thinking to herself, as she plucked her 3-year-old son Alex out of the water and ran for shore. The school of rays swam by undeterred.

As waters warm and rays begin hugging the coastline in their search for food, the scene has been repeated countless times along the Pinellas beaches during the past couple of weeks. Beachgoers who have been warned about stingrays summer after summer take those threatening barbed tails seriously.

[Times photo: Pam Royal] Signs, such as this one at Pass-a-Grille beach, explain how people can avoid painful encounters with stingrays. The ones to watch for stay burrowed in the sand. Their stings' aftermath can last for hours.

Yet there's another side of the stingray phenomenon: Chances are those rays floating gracefully through the water last weekend were cownose rays, mostly harmless creatures that cannot strike nearly as easily as their cousins who live under the sand.

"In my opinion, personally, it would be very difficult to get stung by one," said Daniel Merryman, a biologist with the Florida Marine Research Institute.

About 90 percent of the ray stings off the Pinellas coast are perpetrated by Atlantic stingrays, researchers say, although they qualify that figure by adding that no one keeps accurate information on ray stings. The other stings are most likely from other bottom-dwellers, not the swimming rays.

Under the sand are the southern, butterfly, Atlantic and bluntnose stingrays, which forage for food and generally keep to themselves -- unless a human foot stomps upon them. Then their tails whip up and around, usually striking around the ankle and leaving their victims in pain for hours to come.

The only relief comes from soaking wounds in hot water. The best plan, however, is to avoid getting stung at all. That's where the stingray shuffle comes in.

The swimming rays include the eagle and the cownose rays. The cownose swim in huge schools and don't get much bigger than 3 feet in wingspan. Eagle rays, with wingspans reaching 8 feet, travel alone or in pairs.

The cownose rays that swimmers most often seen locally do have barbs on their tails. But the barbs are located so close to their bodies that they are practically harmless.

The brave at the beach have figured that out. While some run for shore when they see swimming rays approach and others simply know not to fear them -- at least not as much -- some daredevils enjoy interacting with the falsely fierce-looking creatures.

"I finally got the nerve to let them swim around me," St. Petersburg resident Norma Jean Madden said. "They felt like suede, but I wouldn't want to step on them."

"They swim up and down the coast," said Chris Bottomley of St. Petersburg. "You can touch them. They feel like velour."

Not all Bottomley's encounters with stingrays have been as enjoyable. "I had the pleasure of stepping on a "real' ray last year," Bottomley said. The pain persisted for six to eight hours.

Brett Winner, who studies rays and other sea life at the Florida Marine Research Institute, said the schools of rays that look like dark shadows floating across the water only look intimidating.

"The only reason you can get hit by one is if you picked it up or jumped into a school of them and they started swimming off in different directions," Winner said.

That's not to say it's impossible. Winner has handled thousands of stingrays of all types, but he has been stung only once, and it was by a cownose ray -- one of those supposedly harmless swimming varieties.

"It was just an accident-type thing when I was handling them," he said.

Winner also urges beachgoers to shuffle year-round, not just in the summertime. While they may be more prevalent in warm weather, they never disappear.

Winner said he shuffles everywhere he goes in the sand.

"They're not aggressive animals at all, and any of the stingrays are pretty much docile," he said. "Even if the water's murky, they're very visible, and you just shuffle your way out of the water and let them get away."

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