A face only a mother could love!

Every morning and then again in the late evening, I fish.  Not only am I trying to get my supper in the form of a nice redfish, I try my best to catch a few "trash" fish for my crab traps.  Regardless if I do not catch as single fish, I enjoy my time spent on the pier..it is my time..it is relaxing.  Lately, however, we have been hooking a lot of stingrays.  These are used as crab bait if I am running short.  The stingray is quite an unusual fish in all aspects.  What comes to mind first is the fact that even though they are flat, the rays are kin to sharks!  Unlike sharks, though, the rays do not use their jaws as defense, they use their tails.  Those barbed spines in the whip-like tails can inflict dangerous..even deadly..wounds.  However, the stingrays do have powerful jaws!  With their mouths located on the bottom of their bodies, the rays tend to hunt for shrimp, minnows, crabs and even mussels and clams!  Those jaws can crack the shells of the toughest of shellfish!  Those same jaws are highly adept at stealing my bait!

In this closeup view of a stingray, it is easy to see the large eyes and spiracles .  The spiracles help the ray "breathe" in water when it is laying on the muddy bottom.  The water is breathed in the spiracles and force out the gills on the bottom side of the fish!

Yesterday while I was on the pier, I caught yet another of those flat critters!  For any of you who have never hooked into a stingray, let me tell you that they will put up a fine fight on the end of the line!  Mark tells me that they will bury themselves in the mud making it nigh on impossible to pull them to the surface of the water.  I think he must be right!  I heaved and heaved on that fishing pole but to no avail!  I was beginning to think that I had hooked a snag instead of a fish!  Finally, the critter decided that I had aggravated it enough and it headed away from the pier.  That move made it easy for me to turn the fish and get it near enough where I could see just what I had hooked.  Oh, my...another stingray!  It is rather dangerous to try to unhook one of these fish so most folks have the good commonsense to cut the line..I, perhaps, lack that commonsense.  Invariably, I will remove my hook and either toss the stingray back into the water or chop it up for crab bait. This one was lucky.  Having two other poles out, I merely tossed this fish (with hook still in its mouth) up on the pier to let it settle down a bit before I attempted hook removal.  The fish landed upside-down and soon settled where I could start my "doctoring".

In this picture of the ventral side of a stingray, the mouth and nares are easily seen.  The nares act  a lot like a nose in helping the stingray find its prey in murky water!  They have a great sense of smell when hunting for my bait!

 That is when I saw the "face"!  Even though the eyes and spiracles are located on the top of the stingray, the mouth, nares and gills are on the bottom.  It was the arrangement of the mouth and nares that appeared to be some strange face gaping at me!  As I stared at my stingray, I began to think that this potentially deadly fish was rather cute!  Ok...enough of that but it was that momentary lapse that made me toss the critter back into the water even though I was in desperate need of crab bait!  Be free, stingray, be free!