Let us play a little game of Ripley’s Believe or Don’t, What Do I Care. An electric eel can discharge 550 volts of electricity. Underwater creatures are believed to be the only animals on the planet that are capable of generating electricity, and the eel is certainly the most famous. But can the electricity generated by an electric eel really be adverse to human beings? As a matter of fact, yes: an eel can send a shock wave throughout a human body that is standing 10 feet away. Of course, the evolutionary imperative behind the ability of the eel to create electricity is directed toward other fish. An eels uses its ability to shock other fish and denizens of the deep in order to facilitate the process of consumption and digestion.
Electric eels typically grow to somewhere between four feet long and eight feet long. An electric eel is not a smooth and gracefully moving animal like its relative the snake. Instead, the eel moves quite awkwardly through the water using a long anal fin. Strangely enough, all of the vital organs of the electric eel can be located in the front fifth of its body. The other four-fifths of the eel are given over to muscles and its electrical power plant. Simplistically speaking, the eel has two small batteries and one much bigger battery. The organs are essentially musculature in nature and are constructed of coated units known as electroplates. There are seven columns of these electroplate running through the body of the eel. Each of those columns contains thousands of plates. The electricity of the eel flows from the tail to the head based upon the positioning of these plates.
There are cranial motor nerves that power up the eels’ electricity-generation organs. Those electroplates actually generate 15 millivolts each produce the rather stunning overall surge of electricity that makes these eels one of nature’s most astounding creatures. That thing that I called the small battery can be found in the eel’s tail and basically never stops working. While the eels undulates through the water, this small battery issues a very low-voltage wave that serves to create an electric field in the area around the eel. Once a shrimp or barracuda or scuba diver enters into this electric field the result is a distortion. This distortion is sensed by the eel courtesy of pits that are located in its head that allows the eel to determine the size of objects within the electric field.
From what has been determined thus far, the second smaller battery essentially acts merely to turn on the larger battery. And that larger battery sends out the powerful impulses of electricity that can stun a human and kill a potential dinner. Not only is this electrical impulse powerful, it is also exceptionally fast. So fast does the electric send out an electrical charge that by the time you notice the eel you will have already been shocked by it.
