Animal · Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana
Electric eel
Electrophorus electricus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The electric eel is a long, round-bodied fish from South American rivers that can make its own electricity inside its body. It uses weak pulses to find its way through muddy water and strong ones to stun the animals it hunts.
Picture credit: Oleksandr (Alex) Zakletsky (CC BY 4.0) · FakirNL (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the electric eel live?
Home: Slow rivers and swamps of the Amazon and Orinoco.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to about 2 metres long. It weighs about 15 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
An electric eel is not a true eel at all, but a knifefish with a very long tail that holds three electric organs. Those organs are packed with thousands of flat cells stacked in rows, working like tiny batteries. When the eel fires them all at once, the pulse can reach several hundred volts, enough to stiffen a fish for a moment. Most of the time it sends out far weaker pulses instead, using them like a lamp to sense roots, mud banks and moving animals. Its eyes are poor, and the water it lives in is often the colour of strong tea. An electric eel also has to come up for air about every ten minutes, because it breathes through the folded lining of its mouth. The young hatch in a nest of foam and bubbles that the father builds and guards. Fully grown, one eel can be as long as an adult is tall.
Find it on the globe
Electric eel is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Can an electric eel shock itself?
Thick fatty tissue and skin spread the current around the outside of its body, so most of it passes through the water instead. An eel can still feel the jolt of a neighbour nearby.
What does an electric eel eat?
Grown eels hunt fish, shrimps and crabs, while young ones eat insect larvae and worms. Prey is found by touch and by electric signals rather than by sight, and then swallowed whole.
Why does it need to breathe air?
The warm, still water it lives in holds very little oxygen. The lining of its mouth is folded and full of blood vessels, so a gulp of air at the surface works almost like a lung.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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