But eels live in water, which provides additional outlets for the current. They thus generate a larger voltage, but a divided, and therefore diminished, current. To my knowledge, there are no specific studies on why eels can shock other animals without shocking themselves but one possible explanation could be that the severity of an electric shock depends on the amount and duration of the current flowing through any given area of the body.
For the purposes of comparison, an eel's body has roughly the same dimensions as an adult man's arm. To cause an arm to spasm, milliamps of current must be flowing into it for 50 milliseconds. An eel generates much less energy than that because its current flows for only 2 milliseconds.
Additionally, a large part of the current dissipates into the water through the skin. This probably reduces the current even more near internal structures like the central nervous system or heart.
Of course, the current received by any small prey is also only a small portion of the total current generated by the eel. Nevertheless, the current discharged into their smaller bodies is much larger proportionally.
For example, a prey 10 times smaller in length than an eel is about 1, times smaller in volume. Therefore, the small animals close to the eel get shocked, rather than the discharging eel itself. Well, I bet you appreciate your own bedroom a bit more now. No, as their name implies, electric eels are famous for their bizarre ability to jolt both predators and prey alike with a powerful electric shock. This shock can be as strong as volts about five times the voltage available from a standard wall socket.
Although the voltage is dangerously high, the current and duration are quite low. Still, it could kill you, depending on how the electricity travels through your body. How do electric eels generate this electricity?
It turns out almost all cells including the ones that make up your body have an electrical charge. They create this electrical potential using energy from food. But sadly, these charges are useless for shocking your enemies. Salt water is the main ingredient in the red dots. The blue dots are made from freshwater. A second sheet has green and yellow dots. The green gel contains positively charged particles. The yellow gel has negatively charged ions.
The red and blue dots on one sheet will nestle between green and yellow ones on the other sheet. Those red and blue dots act like the channels in the electrocytes. They will let charged particles flow between the green and yellow dots. Just as in an eel, this movement of charge makes a tiny trickle of electricity.
And also as in an eel, a lot of dots together can impart a real jolt. In lab tests, the scientists were able to generate volts. The team reported its initial results in Nature last December. The artificial organ is easy to make. Its charged gels can be printed using a 3-D printer. And as the main ingredient is water, this system is not costly. Even after being pressed, squished and stretched, the gels still work.
He led the study with Anirvan Guha. Both are graduate students in Switzerland at the University of Fribourg. They study biophysics, or how the laws of physics work in living things. Their team is collaborating with a group at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For hundreds of years, scientists have tried to imitate how electric eels work. In , an Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta invented one of the first batteries.
LaVan did not work on the new study. But 10 years ago, he led a research project to measure how much electricity an eel produces. He and his team found that the eel needs a lot of energy — in the form of food — to create a small jolt.
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