Transgenic Sting Ray Shoes

Transgenic Sting Ray Shoes

Best case scenario, it's shoes made of fake leather. Worst case scenario, a con.

Update, 12/22/12: Yep, I called it! It's a hoax. 

So here is a thing which is - I would estimate - at least 93 percent fake. 

Rayfish Shoes is a company based in Thailand which lets you choose the crazy-pants color and pattern you want, then injects the necessary genes into a stingray fetus. When the stingray grows up to shoe size, Rayfish harvests the stingray's leather and boom: transgenic shoes with the wacky pattern grown right into the skin!
 
The claims of being able to custom design skin color patterns (like fuchsia leopard print, or acid yellow zebra stripes) is patently false. Not only is this not possible with today's technology, it's probably not possible at all, ever. 

There is no single gene to control color or coat pattern in animals. And even if there were, there's no way to inject that gene into something as biologically dissimilar as a stingray and have it not only remain a viable fetus, but grow up to express those very same genes. That's just not how biology works. End of story.

It's difficult to tell what exactly is not fake about this. I have doubts that Stingray is even raising rays in aquaculture for shoes, since stingrays are notoriously difficult to raise in an aquaculture environment. In Asia, it's far cheaper just to hire the manual labor to go out and harvest wild stingrays. 
 
It's even difficult to tell if the resulting shoes will be made of stingray leather at all. Obviously the claims of using genetic manipulation to create your custom color patterns are utterly false. But how easy is it to dye stingray leather in the wild colors and patterns Rayfish Shoes promises? It seems a lot more plausible that Rayfish Shoes are just made with regular old vinyl, patterned with stingray leather grain and colored to the user's request.
 
Frankly, the more I examine the site, the more convinced I am that it's someone's "art project," and that it will never actually ship a pair of real world shoes. I see no information about sizing, for example, which you would think would be a fairly important consideration for a shoe company.
 
At best, this is a prank similar to the venerable old Bonsai Kitten website. At worst, it's a cynical way to defraud people out of thousands of dollars for a pair of regular old pleather shoes with a wacky back-story filled with lies. At the VERY worst, it's a con that will take people's money and never deliver a thing.