Why do electric eels discharge? In the swamps of the Amazon River, there is a fish that can discharge electricity. It is a great threat to other fish and humans and animals. It is the electric eel known as the “electric tiger in water”. The electric eel looks like an ordinary eel, but its internal tissues are very special. This freshwater fish, which is about 2 meters long and weighs about 20 kilograms, has four-fifths of the body’s tissues as “generators” composed of muscles. Some power generating organs are like living volt power sources, which are composed of as many as 8,000 thin slices of muscle tissue. Those thinner muscles are more like a small power source that can generate a voltage of 150 millivolts. These power-generating muscles can be connected in series. generate high voltage. When the head and tail of electric eels are stimulated by other objects, they can emit powerful electric currents.
Electric eels can often emit three or four hundred volts, and sometimes even as high as seven or eight hundred volts. The electric eel can easily kill animals smaller than it when it discharges, and it can also stun and even kill mammals as large as cows and horses, and of course humans are also in this range. The internationally recognized safe voltage is 24 volts, and a voltage of 800 volts can cause death in 0.2 seconds! Therefore, humans should be careful when encountering electric eels, otherwise it is really life-threatening.
This is because the thin sheets of muscle that are used to discharge the electric eel grow on both sides of the electric eel’s body, and most of its body is surrounded by its own non-conductive fat, and when it discharges in water, the electricity is transmitted by the water, The resistance of water is less than the resistance of the electric eel’s body, so when the electric eel is discharged in water, the electric eel will not electrify itself, but if the electric eel is in the air outside the water, because the resistance of the air is greater than that of the electric eel’s body, it will discharge at this time. If you do, you will be called by yourself!
