After a few more passes, Meredith had gotten used to the stingrays and was feeding them and petting them like a seasoned pro! The creatures are so big and heavy (they must easily weigh 100+ lbs!) it takes a while to figure out how to feed them without getting knocked over when they get friendly and swim into you!
Which is exactly what happened to me! Our divemaster had warned us that the suction was so strong that if we accidentally got our fingers sucked into the mouth, that we wouldn't be able to get them out! He then explained that if this should happen, you should just relax and that after a few seconds, the stingray would realize our fingers were non-edible and would stop the suction and then you can get your fingers out.
This is exactly what happened to me! Except that when my finger got sucked in, I felt his grindplates grind on my finger, thought "HOLY FUCK! This one's got TEETH!" and then panicked and ripped my hand out of it's mouth as hard as I could! The cut you see on my hand is from where the suction pulled the skin right off my finger! Crazy, right?
Here's a closer view! On the boat, our divemaster explained to us that stingrays don't have teeth - instead they have two cartilaginous "grind plates" that they use to chew their food. When they smell something good, they can generate a ton of suction and they use it to suck the food up into their mouth!
...you can stick out a finger or thumb and put it on their nose and lead them around. It's really funny. You can go around and and around and the stingray will stick right with your hand because it knows you've got some squid in there. Then, when you're ready, you open your hand as quick as you can and hold your hand flat so that when the stingray turns on the super-suction, your fingers don't get sucked up along with the squid!
It was a little scary, but I realized that it was totally my mistake and that the little guy hadn't meant to get a chunk of manflesh. He even came back over to say hi...
The stingray's eyes are on top and it's mouth is all the way underneath. See his happy lil' muppet mouth peeking out? It totally looks like he's smiling!
The rays showed up only a few minutes after we'd arrived on the bottom! Seeing them glide in together is one of the most memorable things I've ever seen. They're graceful and beautiful, but at the same time they're really alien and evil-looking and they have a stinger under their tail that can kill a person!
But at the same time, they were clearly playful and interested in being fed - so I was able to swallow my fear and relax. (This was dive was on August 23rd. Just eleven days later Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray in a freak accident!)
Instead of standing on the sandbar, we were going to jump off the boat about 50ft away from the sandbar, sink to the bottom (only about 15' down) and wait from some stingrays to get a whiff of the squid we holding and come over. Here's our divemaster using a stuffed stingray to explain the stingray's anatomy and demonstrate how you feed them.
were going to be putting on scuba gear and sitting on the ocean floor at a depth
For our second dive, we headed over to Stingray City. Stingray City is a sandbar on the northwest side of the island where the stingrays have become used to people and you can feed them right out of your hand! Here's a quick history of how this came to be that I took from this site:
Years ago before banking and tourism was big in Grand Cayman the main industry was fishing. The fishermen would work the seas all day and return to the protection of the of the reef in the north sound to clean their catch. After years of throwing the entrails overboard, the Stingrays began gathering in the area on the shallow sand bars. The stingrays would feast on the free meal. Soon the stingrays began to associate the sound of a fishing boats with food. In the late 1970s, divers starting feeding squid to the stingrays, which is one of their favorite dishes. Before long, dozens of rays would show up each day to be fed, attracted by the boat engines and the memory of an easy meal.
Here's a pic of a bunch of people standing on the sandbar in the middle of the bay and feeding the stingrays!
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