ABOVE: Electrophorus voltai
L. SOUSA
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).
“That’s bonkers,” Kory Evans, an evolutionary biologist who studies electric fish at Brown University and was not involved in the study, tells Nova Next. “The fact that there’s a living organism that has the ability to generate this kind of violent electricity is really shocking, no pun intended.”
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 ...
