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Animal behavior
High-voltage Amazonian fish invade the buffet.
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, researchers have found that electric eels can work together to cook a meal – much like wolves or killer whales do.
Years of scientific observations had categorized electric eels as solitary predators that stunned a single fish into submission. But Douglas Bastos of the National Amazon Research Institute in Manaus, Brazil, Carlos David de Santana of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, and their colleagues corrected the toll: they filmed more than 100 Volta electric eels (Electrophorus voltai) hunt in groups.
The researchers saw that around dusk and dawn, a herd of eels in a lake began to swim in circles to gather schools of small fish in the shallow water. Then followed a synchronized attack. Up to ten eels simultaneously zapped the prey with powerful electric shocks, causing the fish to jump out of the water and fall to the surface, where they were quickly swallowed up by their predators.
This behavior, says de Santana, is probably rare and can only occur when the prey buffet is plentiful enough to feed a lot of eels.
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