The incident, which revived memories of Australian Steve Irwin's demise, happened yesterday on a Florida waterway.
In the freak accident near Lighthouse Point, the usually docile spotted eagle stingray threw itself into James Bertakis and his granddaughter's boat and drove its barb into the old man.
The 81 year-old suffered a collapsed lung and underwent heart surgery to remove a 15-centimetre-long part of the barb that had lodged itself in his body.
"He's a lucky man," Dr Eugene Costantini, a cardiovascular surgeon at Broward General Medical Centre said after the operation.
"As long as we don't have any problems ... he'll survive this."
Mr Bertakis may have been trying to throw the stingray off the boat when it stung him, according to local authorities.
Steve Irwin -- known around the world as The Crocodile Hunter -- was killed last month when a stingray barb punctured his heart during the filming of an underwater documentary.