Mystery Stingray Pregnancy, Maggots On Flight: Weird News & Oddities – Patch

February 27, 2024 ndowd

ACROSS AMERICA — The weirdest thing happened at a research aquarium in North Carolina. Charlotte, a round stingray, is pregnant and the only males within striking distance are a couple of juvenile sharks.

At first, scientists at the Team ECCO Aquarium & Shark Lab in Hendersonville thought the baby bump was a tumor. When an ultrasound confirmed Charlotte was pregnant, “We were all like, ‘Shut the back door. There’s no way,’ ” said Brenda Ramer, the aquarium’s executive director.
As fascinating as the idea of interspecies shenanigans is, the sharks are off the hook — for the dinner plate-sized ray’s pregnancy, that is. Charlotte had some shark bites — a necessary infliction of pain for the shark to get into mating position — and scientists at the Team ECCO Aquarium & Shark Lab in Hendersonville briefly considered the unlikely scenario.
The explanation may seem even more implausible. Charlotte “decided” it was time to spawn, and she didn’t need a baby daddy to do it. Charlotte is due any day now, according to the aquarium.
Well, this story won’t make it any easier to get on an airplane anytime soon. If emergency door blowouts aren’t enough to ground you, how about maggots?
Yes. Maggots. It rained maggots on a woman who recently traveled to Detroit from Amsterdam. We can’t. We just can’t. They crawled on her head, wiggled around in the seat and threatened the peace and dignity of surrounding passengers who surely, or at least fleetingly, fantasized of flinging open an emergency exit door and forcing them out.
This is the stuff of mob movies. As the mystery unraveled, the source of the maggots was identified as a piece of rotting fish wrapped in a newspaper which had apparently spoiled enough to attract flies. It had been packed in suitcase stored in the overhead bin.
It was so disgusting, the pilot turned back, and the suitcase was burned. But there are still so many lingering questions. Chief among them is: Who packs rotting fish in their carry-on to begin with?
A bright fireball streaked across the skies over nearly a dozen Eastern states Wednesday, with the American Meteor Society taking hundreds of reports of the sensational sight.
No one can quite explain it. Meteor showers are paused until April. The massive glowing object seemed to have traveled from the southwest to the northeast, and some reports said the fireball fragmented during its path across the sky, possibly producing meteorites.
A deer in the Wading River area of Long Island made for an odd but also soul crushing sight earlier this winter as she wandered around with a plastic jug on her head for 10 days.
If deer could think about the world as we do, the thought bubble above this hapless doe’s head might have said something like “thoughtless $#*@!&% humans.” Some humans had that very thought about the selfishness of humans, whose trash had just enough of something tasty to attract her.
A hole in the accidental headdress allowed in some fresh air, “and I’m assuming it’s able to somehow get water,” Broken Antler rescue foundation co-founder Jackie Roche told Patch.
As the days passed, the doe’s situation became more precarious. The story does have a happy ending, though.
When Amber Jirsa shares the story of her birthday, people aren’t quite sure which is weirder — that she was born on leap day, or that she was born in the back seat of her grandmother’s Ford Pinto as her uncle raced to the hospital in rural Mississippi.
What’s so weird about that? It’s not exactly an anomaly to be born in a car.
“They don’t make them anymore because they explode,” the Batavia, Illinois, leaper told Patch.
Patch reporter Michael O’Connell got a glimpse of something humans rarely see on the Ring camera on his Fairfax City, Virginia, home: a flying squirrel.
The Virginia northern flying squirrel is fairly common, but because they’re nocturnal, seeing them is a real treat. The squirrel in question raided a bowl O’Connell’s family kept filled for a neighborhood cat. A fox also investigated the bowl, but slunk away, uninterested.
The video revealed the squirrel as it shot over a bush. It looked like a rectangle with long bands of white on its sides. These stripes are the flaps that connect the front and back legs, which the squirrel uses to soar from tree to tree.
That’s a thing you know now.
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