Brenda Reeves, age 10, of Enid, Okla., for her question:
DOES THE ELECTRIC EEL REALLY HAVE ELECTRICITY?
Yes, he does. The electric eel is not worried about the energy shortage at all. This fishy fellow has his own personal built in electric batteries. True, he does not use them to switch on his own reading lamp. But he does use them to send electric shocks through the water. And the shocks from a big electric eel are powerful enough to stun a horse.
The electric eel lives a lazy life in certain slow, muddy streams of South America. He has about. 50 cousins, large and small, but none of them is related to the genuine slippery¬type eel. However, all of them have their own built in electric batteries. And all of them send weak and strong electric shocks through the water. Other fish are not safe in the water, which explains why electric eels do not have to rush around to escape from enemies.
A large electric eel may be six feet long. He has a thick snaky shape body with two tiny side fins behind his head and a long wavy fin on his underside. His color is murky green to match the murky water. His head and internal organs are crowded into the first nine inches of his total length. The rest of him is a big fat tail. And this is where he keeps his electric batteries.
He has one main battery and two smaller ones. They behave somewhat like a man made dry cell battery. However, naturally they build up their electrical charges inside living cells. They work because opposite electric charges build up in different parts of each battery. The negative charge is up front, the positive charge is at the tail end. When the opposites are discharged, the electric eel sends a shock through the water.
One of his small batteries sends out weak shocks all the time, even when he is resting. When he swims along, he sends out shock signals to find his way. He sends about 50 little shocks every second. They bounce off solid objects, and echo back to tell him how to avoid them. After all, the water is very cloudy and his tiny eyes are almost blind.
The electric eel uses more powerful shocks to capture his food. When a fish swims by, he gets a series of shocks that are strong enough to stun him and perhaps kill him. Then the electric eel swims up to eat his fallen victim. A powerful shock from his batteries is strong enough to stun a human swimmer and several of these mighty shocks may kill him. So no sensible person goes swimming in streams that belong to the big electric eels.