Electric eel

funny@lemmus.org to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 273 points –
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That shock is 3x more powerful than a wall outlet.

Source: I just went to the aquarium.

Nice! How was it?

It was fun actually. They have a place where the stingrays swim up to you and you're allowed to pet them. I was surprised by how they actually want to get pet. They swim up to the side of the wall and come out of the water to get your attention. Like a little water dog.

Thanks for asking!

Rays are awesome. I always tell my student divers not to approach them, but to enjoy it if they decide to be buddies.

I love stingrays and nurse sharks! They're like little aqua puppies.

Edit: I remember when I was little, I always wanted to know if the aquarium we were going to had stingrays and nurse sharks (and sea urchins too, they always had sea urchins in the petting pools). They were by far my favorite part of the aquariums.

Yeah I went to an aquatic petting zoo like 25 years ago when I was a kid with my parents in Mexico, and how cute the nurse sharks and the rays were and how much they enjoyed being pet still sticks with me today.

And that was a hell of a lot of beers ago, pretty sure it’s a core memory at this point.

That's awesome! One of my most vivid early memories is petting rays at the Monterey Bay aquarium on a field trip in elementary school

Needs clarification - do you mean a flowery, lacey, girly American electricity outlet, or a meaty, throbbing, frighteningly-erect rest-of-the-world outlet?

Thank you for making me picture the American wall outlet as a femboy, and the German Schutzkontakt outlet as a Giga Chad.

lol, I took that as you going to the aquarium to grab an eel and let us know its strength instead of relaying a fact that you learned there.

Not 3x more powerful, but rather having 3x higher voltage.

But still enough power to shock an adult human.

But how many amps?

That will heavily depend on the surroundings, your body, and contact points.

Also, freshwater and saltwater eels approach it differently, with freshwater ones (the ones delivering those 600-800 volts) able to give out amperage of around 0,1A.

This may not seem like much, but it is actually enough to stun and paralyze a human, and this is exactly what we see here. If there's nobody to break the contact, the current will keep flowing for several more seconds, and then your heart will stop, with all the consequences it entails.

This is not true. The voltage is 3 times higher, that's part of why it's so debilitating. If the power (amperage) was 3 times higher that man would not have gotten back up. Their amperage peaks at about 1 amp, which is enough to do some damage.

There’s no given amperage coming out of the wall, it’s a product of V=IR. Given a constant resistance for the person’s body, three times the voltage does means three times the current.

“Voltage doesn’t kill you, current does” is a bad statement that’s often repeated. You don’t get current without voltage.

Good electroboom video: https://youtu.be/XDf2nhfxVzg

An eel can only generate so much power, so essentially the voltage will drop so that the power will be lower.

600V at 0,1A will just turn to, say, 100V at 0,6A if the resistance between two points will be 1667 Ohm.

To keep voltage at 600V (and subsequently deliver 0,36A) you need a power source that can deliver 3,6 times more power.

In that sense, amperage is super important. We should always consider capabilities of the power source, this is big part of electrical grid engineering.

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1A amperage is a feature of saltwater eels, ones that produce electricity at much lower voltages, like 10-80V. This is a natural adaptation allowing them to maximize power output in a relatively highly conductive environment.

The freshwater eels, the ones producing 600-800V, are only able to output about 0,1A, because that's just how power works.

1A at 600V would be almost a guaranteed instakill for a human.

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