London Stingrays enchant fans with a game of football (4 photos + 1 video)

London's Sea Life Aquarium shared footage of stingrays play underwater football. A soccer ball issued by the attendants, hollow and filled with stingray's favorite food. Stingrays, attracted by the smell, dive to the ball and hit it back and forth so that more food falls out of it.





London Aquarium Sea Life staff shared wonderful and unusual shots in which stingrays play their own version of underwater football.



Underwater football is designed to stimulate the natural stingray behavior. According to scientists from the aquarium, in addition to entertainment, soccer ball filled with food promotes mental stimulation stingrays.





The footage shows how six stingrays are involved in the game with a hollow soccer ball filled with their favorite fish. The stingrays have a special the ability to locate prey based on electrical fields that emit living beings. However, during a football match, stingrays instead had to rely on their sense of smell to find food. Using teamwork, the stingrays realized that they needed to dive to soccer ball with food, and then hit it and drive it back and forth to got as much food out as possible.

"Our team of stingrays loves to play their own version of great game since we introduce this new game to the start World Cup,” said Rowena Kennedy, supervisor at the London Sea Life Aquarium. - Stingrays are sentient beings, so it's important that we encouraged natural feeding behavior."



“Our feeder soccer balls are a fun and stimulating way to eat. for stingrays as it encourages hunting behavior in foraging and engages their keen sense of smell, just like in the wild,” says Kennedy.

Rays are related to sharks but are flatter makes them well adapted to life on the seafloor. Their mouth nostrils and gills are located on the underside of the body, and the eyes are on top. In There are more than 600 species of rays around the world, the largest of which which, the manta ray, has a length of up to 9 meters.

Unfortunately, studies have shown that large coastal species with flat-bodied are the most vulnerable and endangered. "AT UK larger stingrays such as white stingray and flapper stingray, have become one of the rarest species in local waters,” explained ecologists.