The Amazon Rising habitat at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago is home to five eels, and probes in the water detect electricity and transmit the energy to a light bar and speakers.
Visitors can hear low-voltage pulses coming from the speakers at any time. Guests can press a button to summon bubbles or make it rain on the habitat. The eels become more active and their electricity content increases.
Scientists have long known that electric eels do, in fact, use electricity. However, in the wild they are elusive and difficult to study. New habitats like Shedd allow researchers to learn more about eels and how they use electricity.
The elusive electric eel
(Credit: ©Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernández)
The five eels living in Shedd’s Amazon Rising habitat are unique in that most aquariums and research centers cannot maintain them in groups.
“Usually when you go to a place you only see one person,” says Jim Watson, chief aquarist at Shedd Aquarium.
Shedd got five eels as a child, and Watson says it helped them get used to each other.
Housing five eels together has the potential to help scientists studying eels better learn how they interact.
“Not much is known about these animals because they are a little more difficult to study in the wild,” Watson says.
Shedd’s eel is technically a fish and belongs to the swordfish family. And yes, it is. They are electric. An adult life-sized sword shark can produce up to 800 volts of electricity, Watson says.
Such an impact can knock a person down or cause a fatal disruption in the heartbeat. When an eel in Watson’s care needs treatment, he says he anesthetizes the animal and then monitors its electrical output using a probe connected to a light bar and speaker. Once you can safely handle eels, wear insulated gloves.
“Aquariums are very careful about how they treat these animals,” Watson says.
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How do electric eels work?
Scientists have long studied how eels use electricity. only in recent years Researchers turned their attention to the behavior of eels and how they use electricity to communicate, find their way, hunt and, if necessary, defend themselves.
Eels can produce different levels of electrical impulses depending on what goal they are trying to achieve. When hunting, eels emit low-voltage radio waves to locate and navigate their prey. higher voltage, Starts around 400 Hz is used for attacks.
In some situations, food may be well hidden. Feeding due to low voltage emission I flinched unconsciously. The resulting water disturbance reveals their location. The higher voltage released paralyzes the prey. The eel then stops delivering electric shocks and attacks its prey while it remains motionless. However, if the eel misses its target, the prey has a chance to recover and escape.
Read more: Five senses that animals have that humans do not have
How powerful is an electric eel?
Eels can raise themselves out of the water and shock their targets. From a 2017 article to current biology, One researcher willingly became the target of such a shocking leap.
Because larger eels are more likely to produce stronger impacts, the experiments were conducted in a laboratory setting using smaller eels (about 15 inches long). In several attempts, researchers placed their fists and arms into the top of the tank. In defense, the eel jumped out of the water and onto the researcher’s wrist and arm.
The closer the eel touched the researcher’s arm, the more powerful the impact became. The eels emitted up to 50 milliamps (or 0.05 amps), which the researchers compared to touching an electric fence.
The eels in the Shedd are well-nourished and do not need to eat other eels in the exhibit. “We found that if we placed them with certain fish that they had become accustomed to, they could also detect these pulses. They know it because the fish around them move away,” Watson says.
During feeding time, the eels’ electricity surges with activity and excitement. Otherwise, the eels are satisfactory and safe. This means they use electrical impulses for other purposes, such as navigation and communication.
“They use low voltage much more often as a form of navigation. They’re sending electrical pulses and they’re receiving electrical pulses,” Watson says.
Researchers can determine whether an eel uses electricity to find a piece of food by how its signals change as it approaches. Scientists want to know if such low-level impulses are a form of communication between eels.
In the wild, eels are generally solitary except during mating season. With five eels living in the Shedd colony, Watson said he wants to better understand which electrical stimulation matches specific behaviors.
Read more: Electric eels jump out of the water to increase the impact force.
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Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of America’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a master’s degree from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a focus on media framing, message composition, and stigma communication. Emilie has written three nonfiction books. Her third work, “Light in the Darkness: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy,” will be released October 3, 2023, by Chicago Review Press and is co-written with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
