Newly Described Electric Eel Has Strongest Voltage Yet Measured
canopic jug writes:
A new study finds that there are actually three species of electric eel.
For hundreds of years, scientists had thought there was just one species of Electrophorus, the electric eel, swimming through Amazonian waterways. Turns out, there's three. And one of the newly described taxa delivers an electric discharge of 860 volts, "making it the strongest living bioelectricity generator," the authors write in their report, published in Nature Communications today (September 10).
[...] Carl Linnaeus described Electrophorus electricus 250 years ago, and since then it's been the lone species in the genus. Then along comes Carlos David de Santana. As a kid, he watched electric eels swim in the Amazon River, and now as an ichthyologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, he studies its-or rather, their-natural history.
Also at The Atlantic, The Truth About Electric Eels Has Long Been Overlooked.
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