Camden's Adventure Aquarium exhibit lets visitors touch stingrays

An exhibit that opened Friday at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden enables children to touch those strange and slimy fish called stingrays.

Though they can terrify beachgoers on the Jersey shore, these shark cousins at the aquarium are quite docile, because the stingers embedded in their spines have been clipped.

"The spine becomes very dull, like a pencil eraser," said Mark Kind, the aquarium's animal husbandry director.

The exhibit, which cost $800,000 and took 14 months to build, is part of an ongoing effort to draw visitors by getting them to interact with marine life. The aquarium already has tactile exhibits, including one with sharks. But the stingray exhibit is the first to allow visitors to slosh around with the creatures.

Worldwide, there are at least 96 stingray species. Three are represented at the aquarium: the Southern Stingray, the Leopard Whipray, and the Cownose Ray.

The Cownose, found in New Jersey, "gets its name from their funky-looking face," said Kind. "The head has two separate lobes. When they're feeding, their lobes come down and it looks like cow nostrils."

The Cownose is a schooling species that travels by the hundreds. During mass migration, they're called "golden leaves" because they look like autumn leaves on the ocean. Twice a year, they migrate to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Southern Stingray also reaches the gulf, while the Leopard Whiprays are from the Pacific, near Australia.

Stingrays' slime is apparent to anyone who touches them. A protein-based mucus makes their bodies "feel like a peeled hard-boiled egg under running water," said Greg Charbeneau, the aquarium's executive director.

And that slipperiness helps make mating a contact sport. Since stingrays lack appendages, the male has to bite the female to latch on and then insert one of its two claspers. "It can be rough," Kind said.