Stingrays’ bulging eyes and mouths make them much faster swimmers

By Leah Crane

With their smooth, flexible fins, stingrays are extraordinarily efficient swimmers – but their eyes and mouth stick out, which intuitively seems like it would create drag and slow them down. It turns out that these bulging faces have the opposite effect, allowing stingrays to swim even faster and more efficiently.

Hyung Jin Sung at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea and his colleagues investigated how the protruding eyes and mouths of stingrays affect …