One Volta’s electric eel — capable to subdue small fish using an 860-volt shock — is scary enough. Now envision over 100 eels swirling about, releasing coordinated electrical strikes.
This type of sight was supposed to be just the stuff of nightmares, at least for prey. Scientists have long believed that these eels, a sort of knifefish, are solitary, nocturnal predators who use their electric sense to find smaller fish since they sleep (SN: 12/4/14). But in a distant area of the Amazon, groups of over 100 electric eels (Electrophorus voltai) hunt together, corralling thousands of fish with each other to focus, jolt and devour the prey, investigators report January 14 at Ecology and Evolution.
“That is hugely sudden,” states Raimundo Nonato Mendes-Júnior, a biologist in the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation at Brasilia, Brazil who was not involved in the analysis. “It goes to show how very, very little we understand about how electrical eels act in the wild.”
Group searching is very uncommon in fishes, states Carlos David de Santana, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.”I had never seen over 12 electrical eels collectively from the area,” he states. That is why he had been amazed in 2012 when his colleague Douglas Bastos, a biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, reported seeing greater than 100 eels congregating and apparently hunting together in a small lake in northern Brazil.
2 decades after, de Santana’s team returned to the lake to create more detailed observations. The almost 2-meter-long eels lethargically put in deeper waters during a lot of the day, the investigators discovered. But at sunrise and dusk, these lengthy stripes of black come together, swirling in unison to create a writhing circle 100 powerful that herds thousands of fish to shallower waters.
Once corralling the victim, smaller groups of approximately 10 eels unleash coordinated electrical strikes that may send shocked fish flying out of the water. The investigators have not yet quantified the combined voltage of these strikes, however 10 Volta’s eels shooting together might, in concept, power something similar to 100 light bulbs, ” Santana says. The afterward helpless, floating prey create easy pickings for the bulk of eels. The entire ordeal lasts approximately two hours.
So much, such aggregations are observed in just this 1 lake. But de Santana supposes that group searching might be advantageous in different rivers and lakes with big shoals of little fish. A lot of the eels’ range remains underexplored by scientists, therefore de Santana and coworkers are starting a citizen science project using Native American communities to identify additional areas where lots of eels live together, he clarifies. “There’s still so much we do not understand about these creatures”