Electric eels do not simply stun their prey, a new study has found, but they actually use the current to control their victim.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Science found that the eels use their electric organs to make their prey flinch, which gives up their location. For their study, they put an eel in a tank with bait.
"It's amazing. The eel can totally inactivate its prey in just three milliseconds. The fish are completely paralyzed," Kenneth Catania, a researcher at the Vanderbilt University Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences, said in a press release. "I have some friends in law enforcement, so I was familiar with how a Taser works.
"And I was struck by the similarity between the eel's volley and a Taser discharge. A Taser delivers 19 high-voltage pulses per second while the electric eel produces 400 pulses per second."
The shock is not only fast but strong, and the researchers said the current would be enough to render a grown horse immovable.
"When the eel's pulses slow down - when the eel gets tired at the end of its attack - you see individual fish twitches, with one twitch from every pulse," Catania told BBC News. "That tells us that the eel is reaching in to the prey's nervous system, controlling its muscles."
Catania said he found electric eels to be "fascinating" in general, just for their unique ability to effectively turn their muscle tissue into a battery.
"You and I couldn't activate every muscle in our bodies at once, but the eels can do that [remotely] in their prey," Catania said. "They can completely immobilize prey or they can make prey move, depending on what they would like to do.
"It's amazing in the first place that they can give off electricity... To use that to control their prey's nervous system is incredible."
