Professor Ken Catania
speaker
80 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Professor Ken Catania’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And prior to the experiments, I had done the data collection to know exactly what is the maximum power that the small eel could give off.
So I knew ahead of time the parameters, the worst case scenario of how much I'd be shocked.
And it was only to my arm, so it wasn't passing through my chest.
It has a long eel-like shape in order to accommodate essentially a giant biological battery.
And that giant biological battery is made up of these special cells called electrocytes.
And they are stacked, so to speak, in the eel's body in the same way that you might stack batteries in a very long flashlight that you wanted to have a powerful light with a lot of voltage.
And they're stacked for the same reason.
So when you stack batteries in series, one after the other,
you essentially increase the voltage with each battery that you're adding in the line.
And that is exactly what electric eels are doing when they add these biological batteries to their body.
And that is why they can generate such high voltages for an animal.
They can easily, a very large electric eel could get up to 500 volts, which is truly amazing for something coming out of a fish.
Absolutely.
So a little electric eel, you can imagine they start off only a few inches long.
And you can start to think about physics here, you know, there's no way you could get a lot of power out of a tiny little electric eel.
It also gets more powerful as it gets thicker.
And that is because they can deliver more current as their body gets thicker.
So what the electric eels are doing with this electricity is causing activation of the motor neurons of nearby animals.
That's the same thing that a law enforcement taser does to basically freeze someone up so they can't move.
And of course, if an electric eel wants to eat you, if you're a fish, having your muscles frozen up so you can't move is a bad thing.
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