Fish Out Of Water

There is a crazy story in the news right now about an Illinois woman who was on vacation with her family down in Florida, taking a sight-seeing cruise when a giant stingray leaped out of the water and landed on her. Apparently, it's mating season for the rays and showing off how good they are at leaping is supposed to be a sign to the opposite sex of how strong they are. (Crazy fish - buy an expensive car like the rest of the guys in Miami.) Anyway, the stinger missed the woman, but she was still being slowly crushed by the weight of over 200-pounds of stingray as it flopped around trying to get back into the water (I guess it didn't want to be in this boat any more than the woman). Fortunately, there was a second boat nearby carrying some wildlife officials who were able to come over, throw a rope around the ray and eventually pull it back into the water. The crazy part is that the woman is totally fine and doesn't have a scratch on her. (In a very technical and scientific interview, the captain of the boat described her as being, "slimy, but otherwise ok.") She even made her family continue on with the rest of the day's planned activities because she doesn't want her kids to be freaked out by the ocean.

Now, the reason this story caught my eye is that it comes on the heels of a report out of Texas earlier this week where some fisherman were disposing of the remnants of their bait when a 400-pound shark got a little impatient waiting for them to dump the rest of it and jumped into their boat, presumably to encourage them to hurry up. However, unlike with the stingray, in this case there were no animal control people around and the fishermen were not about to get close enough to get bitten, so the shark ended up dying on the deck. (Really, did you expect a fisherman to throw something like that back?) Personally, I think we should take these two stories as a warning sign. Do you know how they say that animals are always the first to know when something isn't right in their environment, like how dogs feel an earthquake before the rest of us? Clearly, something is going on in the world's oceans right now and the animals want to get away from it. This is why I stick to lakes.

-Keeping up with today's Animal Revolution theme, there is still no sign of the Egyptian Cobra which has been missing from the Bronx Zoo since last Friday. Zoo officials say they are confident that the cobra is still somewhere in the zoo, but consider me skeptical. I've seen enough nature shows to know that snakes have a way of getting through some tight spaces when they want to. If it were up to me they would stop labelling the cobra as 'missing' and start referring to it as 'escaped'. The bad part is that we're not going to know where this thing is until it pops up and most likely bites someone. Normally this wouldn't concern me but I'm a little worried because they haven't told us how fast a cobra can travel and with five full days behind it this thing could easily have made Massachusetts by now. I was all set to begin construction of a moat around my house, but stopped when I heard there have been reports of cobras swimming around in the Mediterranean. (Again, as if I needed another reason to stick to lakes...) Suddenly, I find myself rooting for this incoming Nor'easter.