What do you call a team of electric eels? This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it is a valid question on the lips of researchers who discovered the world’s first electric eels will hunt in groups. Incredibly rare observations based on data from a small lake deep in the Amazon Basin were published in the Journal of Ecology and Evolution. The study, led by C. David de Santana, a research fellow at the National Museum of Natural History Fish Research in Smithsonian, details the discovery of a small lake with more than 100 electric eels.
You may think that eels were made in numbers for lack of size but many of them were 1.2 meters (4 feet) long. Electric eels, which are not true eels but are actually a kind of knife fish (#EelOrNoEel) were never thought to be assembled in this way. Usually, solitary creatures, the discovery of so many electronic eels l was unusual in itself, but seeing only got spicier from there.
In this river-feeding lake on the banks of the Erie River in the Brazilian state of Perry, eels were working together in small fish-ball balls called tetras. Much like a wolf’s clawed claws, eels lions follow tetras in groups of 10 and sometimes split into small swamps and encircle and simultaneously zap their prey. The behavior has never been recorded in the electronic isle before, previously considered a strictly solitary predator although researchers still do not know how widespread the behavior is.
De Santana said in a statement, “Group hunting is very common among mammals, but it is actually very rare in fish.” “There are nine more species of fish to do this which makes it really special to find … If 100 [the law] were in one place, it would be a common occurrence. I think we’ve heard about it before.”
A legend in the de Santana electric fish community, he found 85 new species of electric fish in South America and tripled the number of known electric isle species in the last year (the electric eels lo waits for no epidemic). One of De Santana’s discoveries, described in a 2019 study, was the same species that was found in a group hunt, with the disturbing idea that. Volta’s electric eel, Electrophorus voltage can produce a shock of 860 volts.
De Santana said, “If you think about it, a person of this species can generate up to 860 volts of discharge – so theoretically if 10 of them were discharged at the same time, they could generate up to 8,600 volts of electricity.” “It needs the same voltage to get about 100 light bulbs.”
The next step for De Santana and his team is to directly measure the shock of the simultaneous attack to better understand the full force of the zap used to stop the tetras. Although their voltages are high, lasting for about three milliseconds, according to Shock de Santana, who wrote an email to IFLScience that a by-loti has become obsessed, “I usually feel numbness in the arm at the touch of an electric touch. It is a strong but very short discharge.”
