Gina Ebanks-Petrie, Director of the Cayman Islands Department of Environment (DoE), said on Friday (28) a team from DoE would be picking up the stingrays at the Dolphin Discovery West Bay tourist attraction in Grand Cayman on Monday (1).

They would then be transferred by truck to a boat at Morgan’s Harbour that would take them back to their home at the Cayman Sandbar, where they were tagged in January 2012.

The four, tagged stingrays have been held in quarantine for a week to ensure they were healthy enough to go back into the wild.

There are ten stingrays at Dolphin Point, including the tagged ones, but despite Ebanks-Petrie’s request to take all the stingrays back to the sandbar she said she had only been given permission to remove the four tagged ones.

Her further request to allow DoE staff to tag the other rays so that they could verify at later dates that no new rays from the Sandbar had been added to the facility’s stingray population has also not been given.

Carlos Moreno, the Dolphin Discovery manager, had told a story that the ten stingrays had been caught by local fishermen and swapped for leftover fish bait used to feed the dolphins.  He said the fishermen were going to kill the stingrays to use for bait instead.

The Sandbar and Stingray City are Wildlife Interaction Zones and stingrays there are protected but there is no actual legal protection for stingrays as a species.

Under the current Marine Conservation Law, if stingrays are captured outside these zones, they are fair game for anyone to capture or butcher them up for fish bait.

There is no evidence to prove that the tagged rays were taken directly from those zones otherwise Dolphin Discovery could have been fined a maximum penalty of a $500,000 f and/or one year in prison.

There is, however, no case of this having been brought before the Cayman courts.

Can we assume, therefore, this has never happened?