In this article, Rabbi Shmuel Waldman delves into the fascinating world of the electric eel (EE), a fish known for its unique ability to generate electricity. Despite its name, the electric eel is not actually an eel but a fish. The majority of its body, approximately 80%, is dedicated to three specialized organs that produce electricity, leaving only 20% for vital organs.
This article will focus on the fish called the electric eel (EE). Officially it’s not an eel, but a fish, however, since it looks like an eel, the name stuck with them. So be it. Now, this fish has some very unique structures that generate the electricity. These structures take up 80% of their body.
The EE has three large organs used to generate electricity.
The main organ is light purple in the below picture, the Hunter’s organ is light green, and the Sach’s organ is yellow. The brown on top, going across the length of the body, are its muscles used for moving around to propel the EE forward. The head area is the 20% of the body that holds all the important other organs.
80% is taken up by 3 electric organs and the rest of the organs are in the front 20% part of the EE.
Now, the electricity can be low voltage, 25 volts, medium voltage at 100+ volts, and high voltage at 600+ volts! The Sach’s organ is use to produce the low voltage. It’s used to scavenge around for prey, and to search its environment to find out what’s there. The Main organ and the Hunter’s organ can be combined or work alone, and make medium to extremely high voltage charges. As high at 680 volts can be generated, which is plenty and it can easily cause heart failure to a large crocodile, very quickly. A regular electric house socket is 120 volts and if you ever by accident got slightly electrocuted, you know that it’s already a nice punch at 120 volts. On each side of the EE there’s about 70 stacks of 5,000 – 10,000 flat electrocyte cells in each stack. That’s what these three organs are made of. There can be over half a million electrocytes in one EE. EVERY SINGLE ELOCROCYTE is connected to the nervous system. While each electrocyte, when signaled gives off only a small amount of electricity, like .08 to .15 percent of one volt, when all the electrocytes are trigged off at EXACTLY the same time – it creates a huge amount of voltage. The electric charges come out at great speeds. When at high charge, it can pulsate as fast as 500 pulses per second! Obviously, the electrocytes must be stacked in a very precise way to allow successful electricity generation. There’s the positively charged parts and negatively charged parts that MUST be set up correctly for it to work properly. Now, I know very little about these things, but I am intelligent enough to understand that this needs a very clever and creative plan for it to work. It needs the correct setup of the electrocyte cells, with the positively and negatively charged particles all arranged in the correct order, and connections from the neurons must reach every single of the half a million electrocytes for them to be activated when needed. Otherwise, it just won’t work. These stacks of electrocytes are anything but an accident that’s for sure!
Using just the Sach’s organ, low amounts of volts are generated, which helps them move around and it also can help them find prey in the nearby vicinity through a process of electrolocation.
Depending on how much voltage is used will determine what it can do with it. But, without going into the details, they can avoid potential large predators by zapping them with high voltage shocks. They can use them to find prey, and once the prey is located, they can stun the prey. They can actually freeze the prey’s muscles for a few seconds, which gives them enough time to suck up the small stunned fish. Sometimes, from afar, it will give a quick double burst of electricity into its local vicinity, called a doublet, and it causes in nearby potential prey a twitch in their muscles which helps to give away the prey’s location.
Truthfully, there’s much more to explain about the way all the electrocuting works, but that’s not my focus. My focus is to think about this a little deeper. Firstly, can an accident set up half a million electrocytes all in the correct order? The positive sides and the negative sides all have to be set up correctly or it will break up the voltage flow and that will break up the voltage continuity thereby lowering the full voltage considerably. That all half a million are set up correctly is quite a miracle. The fact that the neurons of the spine that provide the important signals of activation, are connected to all half a million electrocytes in a way that the signal reaches all of them, at exactly the same millisecond (a millisecond is one thousandth of a second) is quite amazing! Signals that are sent as fast as one per two thousandth of one second, with as many as 500 pulsating signals sent PER SECOND, trust me, is also no accident! But here’s the main thing to think about. Can an accident “know” ANYTHING about the simple existence of electricity? Do any animals know what electricity is? Would it “know” of the potential of using electricity as a method to detect and catch prey? Of course not. That’s IMPOSSIBLE! Would an accident HAVE THE SLIGHTEST CLUE how to generate electricity? I read articles about how it works and it’s far from simple, that’s for sure. Can an accident know ANYTHING about the concept positive charged particles and negative charged particles? Can it know how to use them in a way that it could be made to enable them to generate electricity? Can an accident know that it will need to pass sodium ions between the positive and negative charges in order to create the flow of the electric charge? These sodium ions need to be waiting on standby to be summoned at any millisecond to be ready to flow in. Can an accident know that this must be prearranged for the electricity to be generated? Last I checked, ACCIDENTS CAN’T COMPREHEND ANYTHING! So, the Electric eel is another one of Hashem’s miraculous creatures with their electric producing capacity. How amazing are Your works Hashem! (There are a few other water creatures that can generate some electricity, but none come close to the voltage power of the EE. Each of these creatures are also miracles of Hashem!)
Now we can discuss some other points about the EE. Another important fact that must be known is that these EE have very poor eyesight. They also hunt at night which makes that a bigger problem. The water is also typically murky and muddy. So, Hashem gave them this method of finding prey with their electricity. They also don’t have upper teeth so they need to be able to disable the fish so that they can easily suck in the fish through their mouths. In addition, being they live in such muddy waters, the waters are very low in oxygen so Hashem made it that they can, and actually usually do, breathe air. They have gills, but typically the water won’t provide enough oxygen, so they need to breathe air. Even though they have no lungs, their mouths are heavily vascularized (which means it has a lot of blood vessels) with folds that increase the surface area, allowing them to breathe air and get enough oxygen entering these folds and then going into the blood stream. This is a miraculous extra oxygen capturing apparatus, found only in some fish.
Another point that is important is as follows: We said that the electric organs take up 80% of the length of the EE body. The main visceral (vital) organs (which are the soft internal organs of the body, including the lungs, the heart, and the organs of the digestive, excretory, and circulatory systems) had to be “moved” to the front 20% of the body. An EE can grow up to 5 – 8ft long, nevertheless, the typical structure of a fish (see picture below) has these organs spread out nicely along about 80% of the body for effective functioning. Now, in the EE, they “supposedly” got squished into the front 20% of the body, while the electric organs were supposedly being developed by accident. Now, can an accident go and perfectly readjust, replant and squish all the organs into a new cramped space that it wasn’t in before, and/or have to shrink the organs that were supposedly much larger at one time, and still function 100%? Of course not! It’s completely ridiculous! The electric eel was created with their main organs proportionately smaller in size and in its correct, yet smaller space than usual, in the front 20% of the Electric eel, and they function perfectly while Hashem put the electric organs in the rest of the body.
A typical fish with its organs spaced nicely across 80% the body.
Rabbi Shmuel Waldman marvels at the wonders of Hashem’s creation, noting the miraculous aspects of this process. He promises future articles to explore other fascinating creatures and their unique adaptations, further revealing the intricate and wondrous design of nature.