Your Personal Warning Sign
Public Safety Warning From Ozello Shrimper
Between roughly May and October of every year, Florida coastal waters become inundated with Stingrays.
Stingray's are native to Florida and arrive here in the hundreds of thousands every year. When you step into any saltwater body, you run the risk of encountering stingrays. They can be in shallow water, deep water or nearly no water at all. They can be alone, in groups or in massive swarms. Stingray's can be very small or several feet wide. They are white, brown, gold, yellow, grey, black and can come in mottled or spotted configurations.
Many people believe stingray's to be harmless because of the increase in "pet the stingray" pools in zoos and are attracted to them by their pretty colors and strange shapes. When they are not threatened, a stingray is virtually harmless but, when in danger, a stingray can be quite dangerous.
Camouflaged Stingray
Normally benign, stingrays are no joke for shrimpers because they inhabit the very areas that we shrimp and are extremely difficult to see, even with the brightest of lights. This is because stingray's bury themselves in sandy areas just below the surface of the sand. They do this to escape predators and to wait in hiding for prey, like those lovely shrimp we catch, to show up.
When they feed, they love to search the grass flats for food. We humans are just the type of predator they are trying to avoid so normally, if they hear us coming, they get out of Dodge quickly but occasionally you may stumble upon one or several of them while shrimping.
First of all, let's lower the paranoia a little bit. A stingray is naturally afraid of you. Keep that in mind. You may be out of your element but you are still the king of the jungle as far as they are concerned. If you are standing still, they may pass by you or even rub up against you but for the most part will pay you no mind or try to stay as far away from you as possible.
It's another story when you come stomping along hunting shrimp and slam your foot on top of it. A stingray's instinct is to escape when you step on it and in order to do so, it needs to get you off of it as soon as possible. So, it attacks you in defense using a very sharp and poisonous barb hidden in the base of its tail.
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