‘It wasn’t crazy’: biologist takes electric eel shocks in the name of science
Kenneth Catania constructed a living circuit by holding both ends of the animal with specialised gloves to determine its voltage
Benjamin Franklin may or may not have flown a kite through lightning. But British scientist Michael Faraday, a 19th-century pioneer in electromagnetism, definitely grabbed an electric eel. He wrote in awe of animals that gave the “same concussion to the living system as the electrical machine, the voltaic battery and the thunderstorm”.
Faraday decided he had to hold one of these wriggling thunderclouds. When he gripped the fish near its head in one hand and its tail in the other, “the shock of this animal was very powerful,” he wrote in 1838 in Philosophical Transactions.
I’ve been accidentally shocked a couple of times. I knew roughly what I was in for
The animals continue to electrify scientists. Kenneth Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, continued the tradition of getting zapped by eel. He allowed a young electric eel to shock his forearm while he recorded the current. Catania reported the results of the experiment in the journal Current Biology on Thursday.
Catania is no stranger to an eel jolt.
“I’ve been accidentally shocked a couple of times. I knew roughly what I was in for,” he said.
When asked how it felt to have an electric eel shock him on purpose, he said: “I was impressed. Let’s put it that way.”