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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 12 2019, @02:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the shocking-news dept.

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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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 12 2019, @08:25PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Thursday September 12 2019, @08:25PM (#893315) Journal

    No problem, happy to share what I know...

    And I think the reason it's usually rationalized to current is because most people think in terms of 120VAC when they think electrical shock, and because of the potential of grip reflexes and possible inability to move from the source the amount of time usually isn't a consideration in the rescue. Consider the three circumstances, all at 120V

    10 mA (12W) @ 4 seconds = 48 J
    30 mA (36W) @ 3 seconds = 108 J
    75 mA (90W) @ 2 seconds = 180 J
    90 mA (108W) @ 2 seconds = 216 J

    The lower two are cardioversion level energy delivery, which when synchronized should reset the pattern but unsynchronized may well cause a dysrhythmia - figuring the lower part of your armpit it at the level of the lowest part of your ventricles it could induce a 20 bpm rhythm which is unsurvivable.

    The upper two are in the standard range of a defibrillator and could just as easily induce a VFib, flatline, or other nasty rhythm.

    I think where I'm going is that whether you got hit with 40 mA for 3 seconds or 75 mA for 2 seconds, while different in terms of what it might do to the heart, is not something that one is likely to know when you're flat on your back.

    I took a shock once off the secondary of a focusing module from a Sharp TV (closest thing they had to a Triac), probably 5000+ Volts at 1 mA for about a quarter second - I figure around 20J. Fortunately it went from my index finger and exited on the earth ground rail where my right knee was. It was still one heck of a kick.

    Anyway, thanks again!

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