Southern stingrays have a flat, disc-shaped body, with eyes on the top and a mouth underneath. Their wing-like pectoral fins help them glide through the water and along the ocean bottom. The ray's wingspan can reach up to six feet, and length from snout to tail may be more than seven feet. The Southern stingray is found in the sandy bottoms in the shallow bays and estuaries along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. There are more than 100 species of stingrays worldwide.

They have whip-like tails with a sharp spine at the base they use for protection. The stinger is filled with venom and divers have often felt the sting or inadvertently stepped on the stinger when a ray is partially buried in the sand on the bottom of the ocean.

Rays eat crustaceans and mussels from the sandy ocean floor, dropping over their prey and using their wings to dislodge them. They crush their food using their strong mouth plate. Their main predators are sharks, and are sometimes killed by humans for meat and their spines for spear tips and daggers. They are oviparous; the young, called "pups," hatch from eggs outside the body after a gestation period between four months and one year.

Green sea turtles in the Shark Reef come to the Minnesota Zoo from Sea Life Park in Hawaii as part of a conservation and education program. Eventually the turtles will return to Sea Life Park to be released into the wild. Sea Life Park has hatched thousands of green sea turtles on a beach area designed to provide the turtles with a relatively safe environment, they are tagged and then released into the ocean when they are bigger and have a better chance of survival.

In the wild, sea turtles feed on mostly sea grasses, but they will also eat small fish and crustaceans.