They discovered that the electric eel is able to "spill a bull" with a discharge

Electric eel Electrophorus voltai You can take to an animal the weight of a bull or a crocodile. Your defense is a download from up to 860 volts who travels the whole of his body two and a half meters, which is four times more than that of a power outlet. This is described by a study of the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, published in Nature Biotechnology

This animal, family Gymnotidae, was divided into three species that go from Amazonian waters to the Andes. The first divergence occurred more than seven million years ago, at the end of the Miocene and during the Pliocene, when the world has suffered divisions from the geological time scale, while the Pyrenees have risen and the ice has formed in Antarctica.

Although the presence of electrocytes in the eel skull Electrophorus electricus It has been known for 250 years, researchers have shown that two stronger sister species join him now. One of them, the voltai, becomes the most powerful bioelectric living being on the planet. His dump is four times larger than that of a torpedo band, not exceeding 220 volts. Each of these aquatic snakes meet as a family in the same space depending on the properties of the water. The most powerful, very similar to what we already knew, lives in well oxygenated rivers of clear waters with low conductivity that flow in rocky or sandy bottoms; the other, the variiyou walk 300 meters below sea level in murky waters with very conducting depths.

To understand the multiplication process, scientists used 107 copies of these fish and badyzed each skeleton. The study concludes that the three eels have skulls, dentures and a difference of 6.5% in their DNA. This obvious distinction is due, according to one hypothesis of study, to a characteristic ecological specialization of the species for to deal with geological changes there are seven million years. On the other hand, Each species emits a different discharge.

The researchers have detected, thanks to the shape of the electric wave present in the body of the fish, that the voltai, as their name suggests, are the most powerful with discharges of 860 volts, followed by varii with 572 and the electricus with 480. Carlos de Santana, one of the authors of the study, says that these animals they do not pose a deadly threat for humans since the discharge does not exceed three seconds, but "they can cause painful numbness and strong muscle contractions," he says.

The author also recalls that these electric fish have allowed scientific advances. It was these eels that inspired Alessandro Volta in 1799 to design the first constant current battery. The treatment of neurodegenerative diseases reveals in these aquatic animals a source of acetylcholinesterase (enzyme found in nerve tissue and red blood cells). These curious characteristics of the eels also allowed to develop a hydrogel pile feed medical implants. "Comparing the genomes of the three species of electric eels will generate further advances to the origins, underlying structures responsible for the generation and birth of high voltage electrical discharges," concludes the expert.