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
It just seemed like such a strange tale.
Like, why would electric eels attack horses?
So it was kind of a fun anecdote for people to tell, but maybe viewed with a bit of suspicion.
Amazingly, Volta, who is essentially the inventor of the battery, was inspired by the organization of the anatomy of electric eels to invent the battery.
So literally electric eels were a helpful sort of push for this guy to stack these various metal plates together.
in a way that resembled electric eels and invent something that we all use to this day in our daily lives.
That is an example of one of the interesting contributions of electric eels to sort of the history of science.
What I discovered is the electric eels, if you approach them with a conductor, and this was a metal net that I was using, they'll actually leap up out of the water to shock the conductor.
And this was really amazing and shocking both sort of metaphorically and in reality, because they're coming up the net towards your hand.
Of course, I was wearing a glove, but it was still very disconcerting to see this behavior.
took me a while to appreciate what was going on but essentially it is a defense mechanism that the eels have against larger predators this amazing discovery was one of the most fun parts of the research because as it turns out this is almost certainly what humboldt saw in 1800 when he was in the amazon so this story that i told you that not everybody believed
I was starting to see that electric eels will go on the offensive against larger threats.
So it essentially confirmed what Humboldt described was going on.
And this was amazing to me because, you know, on the one hand, I was studying the electrical properties and the dynamics of the electricity that happen when an electric eel comes up out of the water to shock something.
At the same time, I was gathering evidence and support of this famous story from 1800.
And so it was one of the most fun studies that I did because it's clear to me, having seen this, that Humboldt's story is 100% true.
It's exactly what electric eels would do based on everything that we've now seen them do in the laboratory.
It's quite amazingly powerful for an animal.
You know, the kind of thing that I would say, if an electric eel didn't exist and I, you know, were to say, oh, this could possibly evolve, it's within the limits of physical biological parameters, that would be hard to believe.
But fortunately, we have electric eels, so I don't have to make the theoretical case.
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