A giant freshwater stingray was rescued and released along the Mekong River in Cambodia after getting caught on a fisherman’s line earlier this month. The endangered creature was 13 feet long and weighed 400 pounds.
Can we appreciate how peculiar it was that this man, who faces all sorts of extreme danger and toxicity regularly for years, died to a sting ray species that has basically never attacked another soul?
like single digit numbers of people in an entire century leading up to his death were killed by stingrays. He got really unlucky.
It’s like the Canadian pop star that was killed by coyotes. No adult human ever gets killed by coyotes for a century, then bam. Extremely famous pop star?
to a degree it's understandable that it wasn't a croc or snake that did him in. with reptiles, he just knew how to handle them, he could read their body language, he understood their striking ranges etc. freehandling a venomous snake like he did all the time is still risky and i'd never do that, particularly not while distracted by talking to the camera, but he had it figured out and it doesn't surprise me it wasn't that part of his work that killed him. with reptiles, he was always in his own element and on top of the situation. out in the water, with an animal he wasn't familiar with, that was an entirely different story, even though it's still unbelievably unlucky that the ray managed to stab him right in the heart.
You know, I just realized how similarly shaped these guys are to stealth bombers. Has anyone tested if they show up on sonar as well as similarly sized regular fish?
Fish finders use sonar actually so it has to have been tested, even inadvertently, but googling it doesn't give results really.
Someone should know though
