Electric Eels' Secret Weapon: Curling Up to Double Their Charge When Shocking Prey

What's an electric eel's secret weapon? It's curling up. Scientists have found that electric eels temporarily paralyze their prey by shocking them with electricity using a series of bright, high-voltage pulses and double their power by curling up their bodies.

Eels can essentially taser their prey, stunning them before swallowing them whole. Now, though, researchers have found that these eels can curl up their bodies, bringing their tails up and around to essentially sandwich their prey between the two poles of their electric organ, which runs most of the length of their long, flexible bodies.

"I'm personally amazed at this animal," said Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Historically, they've been considered very unsophisticated, primitive creatures that shock their prey. To see them manipulate their electric field and do these more intricate things is really amazing."

The researchers captured the newly observed behavior on film. The film reveal that the eels always curl up in a very particular way; the behavior is common in smaller eels when handling prey that are large relative to their size and in bigger eels when dealing with large fish. Eels also resort to curling up when handling more difficult prey items, such as large crayfish.

"Each of these pulses the eel gives off is activating the nervous system of the prey," said Catania. "The eel essentially has remote control over the prey's muscles and runs them to exhaustion, leaving the prey temporarily helpless."

Currently, the researchers hope to learn more about what the eels eat in their native environments and what prey they use this technique on.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

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