This is not the most handsome fish, let's say that its beauty is not hegemonic and perhaps that is why we don't talk about it more, but let's see, repeat after me, this fish controls electricity to defend itself and to hunt. What kind of Pokémon is it? Pikachu has electric powers and hegemonic beauty, but he is not real and the electric eel is.

In this publication we will meet the fish that has one of the most incredible evolutionary adaptations in the animal kingdom, it kills by remote control, it is the electric eel.

Previously I have shown you animals with incredible abilities, such as the mantis shrimp strike, which can reach temperatures higher than the surface of the sun, or the cuttlefish that hypnotizes you before eating you, but the animal in this post is even more surprising, I think we all know about electric eels.

I'm sure that, when I was little, I saw a cartoon where I learned that they exist and the concept remained in my mind as something very normal until a few days ago I thought, "Hey, electric eels exist." What is a real animal? A fish that controls electricity. What kind of fantasy do we exist in? Humans learned to control electricity just 200 years ago, thanks to the electric eel.

Without the 1775 studies on its anatomy and its ability to produce electricity, Luigi Galvani would not have discovered that the nervous system and muscles are powered by electricity in 1791 and Alesandro Volta would not have invented the first electric battery in 1800.

But how it makes it possible, how they work and although my expectations were high because I consider that hunting prey remotely by means of electric shocks induced in the water is practically forbidden magic, I learned that electric eels are much more impressive than I thought. For starters, electric eels are not eels, they are another order of fish more closely related to catfish than eels, which includes the hypnotid family where knifefish and electric fish are found.

The genus Electrophorus includes three species of electric fish that we call electric eel and are distributed in the Amazon. Electrophorus Electricus in the north, Electrophorus Vari in the center in the Amazon basin and Electrophorus Voltai, so called because of the three species it is the one that produces the highest voltage discharge and also inhabits the basin and the south of the Amazon.

They like to live on the muddy bottoms of freshwater rivers and swamps, especially in shady areas, swamps have little oxygen, but electric fish can take air from the surface into their mouths and pump it along with water to oxygenate it in their gills. They can measure 2 m long and weigh 20 kg, but almost all their organs are concentrated near their head.

The rest of your body is pure muscle and batteries, or rather, the electrical organs that inspired the batteries in our phones, electric cars and many devices that we use all the time. Their eyes are tiny and the truth is that they don't see very well, but they don't need them because in any case the water in their environment is murky, so in order to navigate they use sensors that are those pores that they have from their nose and that run throughout their body.

These sensors are mechanical and detect pressure differences in the water caused by movement, but they are also electrosensitive and allow them to perceive the electrical conductivity of the objects around them. How do they do that? The electric fish all the time produces an electric field by emitting pulses of a very low voltage around it and that electric field when interacting with objects and prey is deformed and the fish perceives it through its electrosensitive pores. It's like bat echolocation, but with electricity.

And some researchers have also postulated that through variations in the frequency of these pulses they can communicate to other electric fish information about their sex and reproductive receptivity, that is, they not only showed us how to make electric batteries, they also invented the Swamp Tinder, but they not only use their electrical powers to navigate and find a partner, they also use them to hunt.

In the video above it is in slow motion, when the image turns red, it means that the fish emitted an electrical pulse. The little fish is suddenly paralyzed and helpless and there is silence. The electric fish attack induces 500 pulses per second of up to 860 V and 1 amp, all the muscles of the little fish contract and it becomes dinner.

If the electric fish suspects that there is a prey nearby, but it is too still and cannot detect it, it discharges two high voltage pulses, only two, this scares the prey which begins to swim quickly to escape and in this way it can detect its location to attack with the high voltage and high frequency pulses that will immobilize its prey. The electric fish has three electrical organs and they function similarly to our muscles. They are activated by electrical impulses.

In these organs, the electric fish has modified muscle cells to create a potential difference, the electrocytes are connected in series and add that voltage to discharge simultaneously, reaching enormous voltages that can knock down a human, but they not only use their electrical powers to hunt or find a mate, also to defend themselves and deter their predators, if you go into the swamp, and there is an electric fish that you probably have not even seen and it feels threatened by your presence, it will go towards you and rest its chin on your torso, this is not a loving gesture, on the contrary, like Shrek, he is making sure that you get out of his swamp and don't come back.

The electric fish has the positive pole in its head and the negative pole in its tail. When it lifts its head out of the water to make contact with your body, it is making sure that the entire discharge passes through you. In other words, it is a much more concentrated and painful discharge than the one they give you underwater.

If this unlocked a new fear of getting into murky waters, electric fish from different places can gather at a single point, a shallow pond, to hunt in groups and it is believed that they coordinate this through their electrical communication at a distance. There they corner large groups of little fish and then unleash their attack all at once.

A group of 10 electric fish can collectively emit discharges of 8600 V. Trust me you don't want to be near the mud when they hunt in groups and electric fish are not the only fish that use electricity. Among their close relatives are several groups of knifefish that generate electric fields to navigate their environment, meaning using electricity is an ability that has arisen several times during the evolution of aquatic life.

Pikachu is not aquatic, but he is not as fantastic as he seems.