Stingrays are stinging more Southern Californians. Here’s why

I recently had the excruciatingly painful experience of being stung by a stingray while swimming at Bolsa Chica State Beach. It was my second time being stung, so as soon as I felt the familiar stab in the bottom of my foot, dread arose. But at least this time I knew what to do.

I hollered at my friend in the water — “I got hit by a stingray!”

Ironically, I’d just been telling her about the “stingray shuffle” — the strategy to shuffle your feet as you enter the water and therefore scare any nearby stingrays away.

I swam as fast as I could to the sand and sprinted to the nearest lifeguard tower. Already, the pain was sharp in my foot, and I could feel it pulsing up my leg, growing more intense. I took deep breaths and tried to keep my face stoic.

Now, you lucky folks who have never been stung may be smirking at my desperation. But if you know, you know — a stingray’s sting is no joke.

A kind lifeguard wrapped my bleeding foot in gauze and drove me in his pickup truck to the main tower. When we got there, I hopped into a painfully comedic scene: About 10 other sorry souls sat in a semicircle of chairs, each with one foot in a bucket full of scalding water.

We passed around a hose of hot water, taking turns refilling our buckets as soon as the water started to cool. You have to keep the temperature as hot as you can tolerate, to neutralize the venom and stave off the pain. There were so many stings that day that lifeguards handed out shiny bags of hot water when they ran out of buckets.

As I waited for my pain to fully subside — it can take more than an hour of soaking in hot water — I watched as a steady stream of people came and went for their stings.

A young teen, bawling, was consoled by her frantic dad. Others sat silently, grimacing occasionally as their friends or family patted their backs. When the hose with hot water was hogged by a single party too long, the rest of us grew anxious and a little desperate. Still, everyone treated each other kindly — after all, misery loves company.

As I sat with my own foot in a bucket of hot water, I had time to wonder: Why are so many people getting stung? And has it always been this way?

Bags that lifeguards hand out for stingray victims in need of soaking their feet in hot water.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Fewer predators, more stingrays

We have four types of stingrays in Southern California waters — bat rays, diamond rays, butterfly rays and round stingrays.

“The round stingray is the one that most people come to know and love at their local beaches, because they're the most abundant, and they're the ones that people accidentally step on the most and get stung by,” said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach.

Round stingrays come into contact with our feet because they forage on the sea floor for clams, crabs, isopods and small fish. They hide from predators under the sand while they digest. Understandably, they strongly dislike being stepped on, especially with a full belly. I don’t blame ‘em.

Round stingrays range from Panama up to Santa Barbara County — the northern tip of their range. Over the last hundred years, their populations have been growing steadily, largely because we killed off many of their predators, such as sea lions, white sharks and sea bass, last century.

A round stingray (Urolophus halleri) in an aquarium.

(

shurub

/

Getty Images/iStockphoto

)

Now, thanks to conservation efforts and improved fishing practices, many of those predators are making a comeback.

“As a result of those predator populations coming back, we expect the round stingray population to get tamped down a little bit,” Lowe said.

Stingrays or “white shark pancakes,” Lowe joked, are “the first food we think the juvenile white sharks that hang out off our beaches really take advantage of.”

More people, more stings

At the same time, coastal development over the last 100 years has destroyed much of the habitat that stingrays prefer, such as lagoons and estuaries, which have calm, shallow warm water and sediment to hide under. Now, the habitat available to them is primarily coastal beaches.

“That puts a lot more people in the path of what we call prime round stingray habitat,” Lowe said.

In January, officials at Huntington Beach warned beachgoers of an uptick in stingray activity. Down the road in Seal Beach, a popular surf spot has long been known as “Ray Bay.”

Here in Southern California, estimates are that lifeguards treat more than 10,000 stings a year, Lowe said. That’s likely a very conservative estimate, he added, since many people don’t seek treatment.

The climate change effect

Climate change is increasingly playing a role in stingray life too, Lowe said, by warming waters that historically have been too cool for them to survive.

Over the last 200 years, human society has pumped an unprecedented level of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is heating up the planet. The ocean has been our main buffer to the worst effects of that pollution — it absorbs about 30% of all carbon dioxide emissions and about 90% of the excess heat generated by those emissions, according to NASA.

The marine heat wave known as "the blob" at its near maximum areal extent in September 2014, left. At right, the ongoing marine heat wave at its near maximum areal extent in September 2025.

(

Courtesy NOAA

)

That’s not only changing the chemical composition of the ocean, but also driving worsening marine heatwaves or “blobs,” which can lead to mass die-offs of marine life. In fact, we’ve been in a record-breaking marine heat wave since last summer.

“The pattern at which these marine heat waves are increasing is clearly an indicator of climate change,” Lowe said. “So these are all real true harbingers of climate change, and we're seeing the animals that live in these environments respond to these conditions.”

Human-caused climate change is making marine heat waves more extreme and frequent. his graph depicts the increasing surface area of marine heat wave anomalies in the California Current region from 1982 to the present.

(

Courtesy NOAA

)

Though they can withstand only so much heat, stingrays prefer temperate, subtropical waters.

“As the ocean continues to warm, that range gets pushed farther north, which means the habitat in Southern California just becomes even more pleasant to the round stingray,” Lowe said.  

Over the last 50 years, round stingrays have had periodic pulses as far north as Monterey. And with an El Niño weather pattern likely year this year,  ”we might start seeing animals even farther north,” Lowe said.

Warmer waters may sound good for stingrays, but it’s not a great sign for the health of the ocean. Last year’s extreme marine heat wave led to massive algae blooms that sickened and poisoned marine wildlife.