Can an electric eel stun a horse?

The electric eel can stun their prey by delivering a shock of up to 860 volts. According to one study, the shocks from leaping electric eels are powerful enough to drive away animals as large as horses by activating the nociceptor sensory neurons in the horse. The electric eel stacks some 6,000 electrocytes in series (longitudinally) in its main organ; the organ contains some 35 such stacks in parallel, on each side of its body. The eel can either use its electrical discharge to locate pray (electrolocate) or to stun them. It is said that Volta was inspired by the electric eel in inventing the voltaic pile, the first electrical battery that could continuously provide an electric current to a circuit. Volta does casually mention the electric eel in an essay.

3 Comments

ExtremeDullard@piefed.social · 3 pts · 6d

Depends on whether the horse is broken in: if it's still green, it will have a lot of resistance.

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WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 6d

I think the horse could outrun or stomp the eel on land and in the water why would the eel let a horse get close enough to it to need to defend itself? Eels are much better adapted to quickly swimming away than horses are. Even a hungry horse, swimming out to sea and dead set on eating an eel but would be unlikely to catch it.

SamuraiBeandog@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 6d

There's old reports of electric eels killing horses in South America, during river crossings. It looks like there are situations where many eels can end up clumped up together in shallow water or where they've been isolated by flood waters that then recede and the large numbers of them can produce dangerous levels of shock.