What Day of the Year Has the Most Stingray Stings?

If you’ve spent much time at the beach in Southern California, you’ve seen evidence of a stingray sting: perhaps a yell out in the shallows, someone hopping out of the surf, or a line of people with their feet in buckets. When exactly is that line the longest? Frankly, this is mostly just a curiosity. But I’ve been thinking about it for a couple weeks now, so let’s dive in.

How Can We Calculate This?

First, let’s address the elephant in the room – we have no daily log of stingray stings. Some lifeguard stations try to tally the daily count of stingray stings, but an accurate count of stingray injuries is never really a priority for the lifeguards. They’re too busy trying to stop drownings and other injuries to keep niche statistics. We’ve also heard of some lifeguards filling out a single report for a full line of people. All this to say, we don’t have a spreadsheet we can quickly look at to determine the answer. Instead we’re going to do some creative estimation.

Thankfully the lifeguards aren't spending their time doing this

We do have an estimate of the total number of stingray injuries in Southern California: Chris Lowe of the CSULB Shark Lab estimates over 10,000 stings in Socal every summer. Unfortunately, I don’t know of an estimate for any other stingray hot spots. In an ideal world I’d at least like to consider the west coast of Mexico and Central America, Indonesia, and India, but we don’t have that sort of data. So let’s restrict our analysis to Southern California. Because it is a stingray hotspot, a tourism hotspot, and an iconically beach-y location, I think it’s likely that SoCal’s contribution to stingray statistics is larger than most other locations, so this restriction will probably still allow us to make a decent estimate.

Beach attendance is highest on weekends, even in the summer. So we can probably guess that many of these 10,000 + stings happen on weekends. Let’s say that 50% happen over the ~13 weekends of summer. We coil calculate an estimate of stings-per-weekend just from this data, but there’s another complication: beach attendance is even higher on holiday weekends. The biggest summer holidays for Southern California are the Fourth of July (American Independence Day), and Labor Day (September 1st). I don’t know how much higher attendance is on these days, but let’s guess that they each have 150% of the ‘normal’ summer weekend attendance. In this case, it’s as if we have a secret 14th weekend of summer beach attendance, which is split over Labor Day and the Fourth of July.

Alright, Let's Make an Estimate

Let's make our actual estimate:

stings_per_summer_holiday_weekend = (10000*50%)*(1.5/14) = 535 stings over a holiday weekend!

This is just a rough estimate, and the real number of injuries will vary with individual weather, wildlife, and watersports patterns. If I had to guess, I think this number might actually be low. For example, lifeguards at Huntington State Beach counted 176 stingray stings on a single day in October 2019!

But I'll guess that:

1. the date with the most stingray stings is probably July 4 or Sept 1.
2. there are probably 500+ stings over those holiday weekends in SoCal, or about 250+ stings per day.

Conclusion

The best way to avoid becoming a stingray statistic on a busy beach day? Prevention. Shuffle your feet when entering the water, avoid stingray-prone areas during peak times, and consider wearing stingray-resistant footwear like our Dragonskin® Booties. Traditional neoprene booties offer little protection, but Dragonskin Booties are purpose-built to resist punctures from real stingray barbs—tested and proven.