Electrophorus electricus

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m interesting in . . . well, pretty much anything. One of the things that I have always found particularly fascinating is biology. I remember when I was a kid, I found this book on the family bookshelf called “I Am Joe’s Body,” which was a collected series of Readers’ Digest articles about different organs in the human body. It sounds mind-numbingly dull, but I thought it was awesome and read it like three times.

Anyway, this week was May Holiday (more on that later), and on Wednesday, we went with some students up to the Shanghai Aquarium. I really like aquariums, and I wasn’t disappointed. They had lots of cool fishies, neat tank setups, sea turtles, sharks, jellyfish, and some electric eels.

I was so fascinated by the electric eels that I read a bunch of stuff on the Internet about them as soon as I got back to the room (for this, I refer you to wikipedia.org). I just thought I’d pass some SUPER-AMAZING info along about one of the humbler parts of creation. Keep in mind this is the very-simple-and-possibly-even-slightly-wrong version, as befits my unscientific background. Any marine biologists, feel free to correct me.

Almost the entirety of the electric eel’s long snakey body is taken up with it’s electrical organs -- all of the vital organs are squeezed into the front bit just behind it’s head. The electrical organ responsible for zapping the unwary is basically just a big organic battery made up of long chains of weird muscle cells. The thing that’s weird about them is that, unlike regular muscle cells, they don’t contract when they’re stimulated. Instead, by an amazing process of chemical wizardry, the cells’ polarity changes and they discharge electricity. This, frankly, isn’t that impressive, since each cell only discharges a teensy-weensy bit of juice—not even enough for an adult human to feel, probably.

No, the impressive part is this—there are thousands of these cells all jammed in together. Now we’re getting somewhere. There’s just one problem, though; the cells are arranged lengthwise along the body, which means that some are further away from the brain than others. That means that the nearer cells will receive their signal from the brain sooner than the farther cells. Normally, that’s not a big deal when you’re doing something slow and clumsy like walking and chewing gum. But when you’re talking about electrical discharge, it’s important for the cells to all fire at once; otherwise, instead of one big ZAP!, you’d just get a longer, weaker PHHBBBBT. So, get this! The nerve cells connecting to the NEARER battery cells are doubled over into all kinds of squirrelly loops, so that they’re longer and thinner. Longer means that the signal takes longer to travel, and thinner means that the signal travels more slowly. Who cares, you say? Well, this AMAZING mechanism allows all the battery cells to receive their signal to discharge at the same time instead of at different times.

That means (for an adult electric eel) that five to seven hundred watts of pure electrical power can go blasting into whatever the eel is touching, stunning or killing it so that the eel can have a tasty fishy snack. In case you didn’t know, by the way, 600 watts is enough to kill an adult human under the right circumstances, so kids—don’t try this at home!

So why even bring it up? Who cares? Aside from the fact that it’s just SO AMAZINGLY SUPER COOL, it’s frankly pretty incredible to look at an ingenious and intricate design like this and think that it all just evolved out of . . . amino acid chains. Yep, pretty incredible . . . in-credible, I say. “In” being the operative prefix.

Dave