You’ve heard of the Cupid Shuffle but have you heard about the stingray shuffle?
It’s the process of shuffling your feet in the sand when you’re in ocean waters to let a stingray know you’re there.
“Instead of stepping on the ray and potentially risking getting struck by one, if you shuffle your feet, you might just push it out of the way,” said Benjamin Perlman, a lecturer in the Biological Sciences Department at California State University Long Beach.
He and his students have been studying stingray behavior to figure out the anatomy of a stingray, and when and how they attack.
“They will try to escape most of the time. But if you pin them down in the center of their body, they will most likely strike,” Perlman said.
His first-of-its-kind research has found that when a stingray can’t escape, they will sting their potential predator (yes, you).
“It's just a defense mechanism,” Perlman said. “They don’t want to be stepped on.”
So when you take shuffling steps, you’re less likely to step on the part of the stingray that will get you stung and turn your beach experience into a painful nightmare.
There are limits around the experiment to protect the stingrays, including their eventual return to the wild, but how to keep researchers from a barb in the foot? They figured out a way to trigger a stingray to attack on cameras with a very creative technique.
“A colleague of mine went to the Halloween store, and purchased a zombie foot,” Perlman said. “I filled it with sand, stuck a big PVC pipe in that, and now all of a sudden I have this fake foot.”
He added that the prop foot has a gory design: “It's sort of greenish and bloody so that just adds to the comic nature of all of this when we're filming.”
Recently, Perlman felt a fierce sting of a barb when his hand slipped while handling a stingray.
“Not only do you get the puncture wound, you basically have a needle going into you,” he said. “But they also release toxins.”
On a scale of 1 to 10, Perlman rated his stingray injury as a memorable 7.5.
Stingrays can be found from Central California into Baja, but Perlman says they tend to congregate near the northern part of Seal Beach, also referred to as Ray Bay. You can even find them along Belmont Shore, near the outfall of the San Gabriel River.
“It’s calm, it’s sandy, there’s lots of little invertebrate food items to eat,” Perlman said.
Mission Bay in San Diego is also another hotspot.
If you happen to get stung at the beach, you need to contact a lifeguard as soon as possible.
They’ll hand you a tote bag filled with hot water so that you can stick the stung part of your body into it for two hours. That will help break down the toxins released from the barb of the stingray’s tail.
