Professor Will Crampton
speaker
73 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Professor Will Crampton’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Electric eels are really rather graceful animals.
They swim very slowly and gracefully, backwards and forwards, by undulating their very long anal fin.
They look rather regal as they swim around.
And they also live in groups.
They're not aggressive animals for the most part.
Of course, when they're hunting, they may be.
The electric knife fish are a group of fishes in an order called the gymnotiformes, which means the naked back fishes.
These are fish that are restricted to South and Central America, and they're probably closely related to the catfishes.
And they all have the ability to generate electric fields in the water around them.
And to use those fields in conjunction with a cutaneous array of electroreceptors, so electroreceptors spread across their skin, to locate nearby objects, which they do so in total darkness or often in very murky water.
And they can also use these electric discharges to communicate with members of the same species.
Air is an extremely poor conductor of electricity.
And likewise, there are no land animals that have the ability to sense electric fields using specialised receptors that detect electricity.
The only exception to that is the spiny echidna.
Most of the body mass of an electric eel is electric organ.
They have three electric organs.
One of them is called the main electric organ.
Another one's called the hunter's organ.
And there's a third one called the sack's organ.
And we still don't know exactly how the three of them work together, but the main organ is the largest one, and that's the one that's responsible for their very high voltage predatory or defensive shock.
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