Electric Eels: Their Jolt Can Locate Prey Then Paralyze It Like A Discharge From A Taser [Video]


The Amazonian fish known as the electric eel delivers a jolt strong enough to knock down a horse with a high-powered electrical discharged being likened to a shock from a Taser!

The scaleless electric eel uses the super-charged electric jolts to completely incapacitate its prey, according to Science Daily. After nine months of studying the electric eel, researchers at Vanderbilt University have determined that a six-foot-long electric eel can hit its prey with five times the shock of a standard U.S. electrical outlet. Generating 600 volts of electricity, the electric eel’s zap is being called uncannily similar to that of a zap from a Taser.

Kenneth Catania’s article, entitled “The shocking predatory strike of the electric eel,” was published last week in the journal Science.

The movements of the electric eel are so quick that Catania videotaped the fish via a high-speed video system. Watching the eels’ movements in slow motion, Catania discovered three different electrical discharges that electric eels are capable of generating. The eels send out low-voltage pulses to detect their environment, sequences of two or three millisecond-long pulses of high-voltage when hunting and high-voltage, high-frequency pulses when attacking prey or defending themselves from attack. The third type of discharge temporarily and completely immobilized the prey.

“It’s amazing. The eel can totally inactivate its prey in just three milliseconds. The fish are completely paralyzed,” Catania explained. “I have some friends in law enforcement, so I was familiar with how a Taser works. And I was struck by the similarity between the eel’s volley and a Taser discharge. A Taser delivers 19 high-voltage pulses per second while the electric eel produces 400 pulses per second.”

In order to figure out if the eel’s jolt was similar to a Taser, which functions by overwhelming the nerves that control muscles, Catania placed a pithed fish on one side of a divide aquarium that had an electrically permeable barrier. He placed an eel on the other side. A press release explained the findings.

“To determine whether the discharges were acting on the prey’s motor neurons – the nerves that control the muscles – or on the muscles themselves, he placed two pithed fish behind the barrier: one injected with saline solution and other injected with curare, a paralytic agent that targets the nervous system. The muscles of the fish with the saline continued to contract in response to the eel’s electrical discharges but the muscle contractions in the fish given the curare disappeared as the drug took effect. This demonstrated that the eel’s electrical discharges were acting through the motor neurons just like Taser discharges.”

Catania said that the electric discharge mechanism of the electric eel is extremely remarkable because if an eel’s prey is hiding somewhere, the hunting pulses can force the animal to twitch slightly, revealing its location. Then, when the electric eel sends out the paralyzing Taser-like zap, there is absolutely nothing the prey can do.

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