Story from the stingray who got pregnant without a male

Two months after a North Carolina aquarium revealed their round stingray was expecting — despite never interacting with a male stingray — followers of the pregnancy are wondering how, exactly, this could have happened — and when these miraculous babies are going to appear. And the aquarium’s executive director tells TODAY.com that even her understanding of the pregnancy has narrowed since she first announced the news.

For eight years, Charlotte the stingray has resided at the Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO in Hendersonville, North Carolina. According to the aquarium’s executive director, Brenda Ramer, she was adopted from a private home outside the city of Charlotte, North Carolina and is estimated to be between 12 and 16 years old.

Despite Charlotte never encountering a male round stingray since arriving at the aquarium, a February livestream of an ultrasound at the aquarium showed that Charlotte is pregnant.

"We found out that Charlotte is expecting, and it's a really strange and unique phenomenon," Ramer explained during the livestream ultrasound. "She's carrying somewhere between three and four pups."

Users were quick to express their fascination about how exactly the stingray became pregnant. One theory Ramer presented is that she was impregnated by sharks who shared her tank at one point.

"I’m sorry, she may have mated with a shark?" one viewer commented on the livestream.

“I had no idea it was possible for a shark to impregnate a stingray,” another wrote.

Now, months after her pregnancy announcement, some users have grown wary of the likelihood of her pregnancy.

"I thought they (were) only pregnant for a couple of months," one user commented in a recent update about Charlotte from the aquarium. "It’s been way over that. Are you sure she’s pregnant or is this just for views?"

To learn more about the possibility and circumstances of Charlotte's pregnancy, TODAY.com spoke to Ramer and a stingray expert for answers. Here's what we learned.

How did Charlotte the stingray get pregnant?

In the aquarium's February announcement of Charlotte's pregnancy, Ramer offered two possibilities for her status — the first one being the shark theory.

Benjamin M. Perlman, who has a doctorate in biology and is a lecturer at California State University — Long Beach’s Department of Biological Sciences, researches and studies stingrays. Speaking to TODAY.com, he says that cross-species mating and reproduction aren't possible in this case.

He explains that “the morphology of the male shark won’t necessarily fit with the morphology of the female round stingray.”

In the months since her livestream announcement, Ramer tells TODAY.com she now believes Charlotte became pregnant through parthenogenesis.

Britannica defines parthenogenesis as a "reproductive strategy" in which a female can develop and produce offspring without fertilization.