04/13/2026
Good info about stingray encounters... although Carpinteria beach is not nearly as bad as this described encounter ... at the life guard station, a circle of sting ray victims! Remember the "shuffle" Shirley Johnson
"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." .."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."
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.
Climate change and a historic lack of predators are the main culprits that have helped round stingray populations here.
