What do you call a group ofelectric eels ? It vocalise like the start of a joke , but it ’s a legitimate question on the lips of research worker who made the world - first discovery that electric eels will hunt for prey in groups . Based on findings from a belittled lake late in the Amazon basin , the incredibly rare observation was published in the journalEcology and Evolution .
The study , lead by the Smithsonian ’s National Museum of Natural account fish inquiry associateC. David de Santana , details the find of a little lake containing over 100 electrical eels . You might think that the eels were produce up in number for what they lack in size , but many of them were more than 1.2 metre ( 4 feet ) long . Electric eel , who aren’ttrue eelsbut really a eccentric of knifefish ( # EelOrNoEel ) were n’t thought to combine in this way . Usually solitary creatures , the discovery of so many electrical eels was unusual in itself , but the sighting only start out spicier from there .
The eel in this river - fed lake , along the banks of the Iriri River in Brazil ’s state of Pará , were work together to herd small fish called tetras into tightly packed balls . Much like a gang of wolves , the eel go after tetra in mathematical group of 10 , and would sometimes break up into smaller swarm to surround and simultaneouslyzap their prey . The conduct has never before been document in galvanising eel , previously thought to be strictly solitary hunters , though the researchers do n’t yet lie with how widespread the behavior is .
" Hunting in group is pretty common among mammals , but it ’s actually quite rarefied in fishes , " de Santana said in astatement . " There are only nine other species of fishes know to do this , which make this finding really peculiar … If 100 of [ the eels ] being in one place was a unwashed occurrence , I conceive we would have heard about it before now . "
De Santana is something of a fable among the electric fish community of interests , having discovered 85 new metal money of electrical fishes in South America and tripling the act of knownelectric eelspecies in just last year ( electric eels await for no pandemic ) . One of de Santana ’s discoveries , described in a2019 paper , is the same species to have been found hunting in group , a upsetting sentiment in the context that these eel were find to have thestrongest electrical dischargeof any animal on Earth . The Volta ’s electric eel , Electrophorus voltai , can produce a stupor of 860 volt .
" If you think about it , an individual of this mintage can produce a discharge of up to 860 volts - so in hypothesis if 10 of them discharged at the same prison term , they could be bring forth up to 8,600 volts of electrical energy , " de Santana say . " That ’s around the same electromotive force needed to power 100 light bulb . "
The next step for de Santana and his team is to take lineal measurement of the shocks fork over by coincident attacks to better infer the full force of the zap that ’s used to sandbag tetras . While their voltages are high , the shock endure for around three millisecond according to de Santana , who in an email to IFLScience described gettingzapped by an eel , “ I usually feel numbness in the weapon that bear upon the electrical eel . It is a potent but very short discharge . ”
So , just one question remains …
