![]() ![]() Graber: And so this is a story basically of eels leaping out of the water and attacking the horses?Ĭatania: So he didn't actually describe them leaping out of the water. A couple of them escaped but most of them were kept in the pool by the fishermen who were surrounding it and waiving reeds and yelling and so forth. Two of the horses died, probably according to Humboldt, from being stunned rather than from electrical shock. Some of them pressed themselves against the horses, shocked the horses. The way he described it the eels emerged from the mud, swam to the surface. They made a huge noise as they galloped into this pool and there was this kind of epic struggle or sort of battle you could almost say between the horses and the eels. And he hired some local fisherman to collect these eels.Īnd the fisherman said, "We're going to fish with horses." And after a little while the fisherman came back herding about 30 horses and mules. He traveled to another place where there was a drying up pool that remained from a stream in the dry season. And he was looking for fresher specimens. And so they had sort of been through a rough time. This is of course written in German originally. And he had had some brought to him by fishermen that had been-I guess he used the word-enfeebled. Graber: And so what did he do and what did he see?Ĭatania: So he really wanted to get these electric eels. And electric eels were one of the few potential sources of this seemingly magical energy. So this is one of the many big questions and mysteries of the day. And at that time period-this would've been around 1800-he was really interested in following up on this mystery about what is electricity and are the kinds of things that animals are giving off, is that the same thing as the electricity that you get out of a Leiden chart for example? And one of the most famous and longer ones was to South America. Here is Cynthia.Ĭynthia Graber: To set the stage for this research who was Alexander Von Humboldt and what is his legendary story about attacking eels?Ĭatania: So he was a famous naturalist and he went on many different sort of adventures and fieldtrips to sort of study nature. So we had frequent 60 second science podcast contributor Cynthia Graber get in touch with Catania to find out about these fantastical battles between electric eels and horses. And he's the author of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled: “Leaping Eels Electrify Threats Supporting Von Humboldt's Account of a Battle with Horses.” Not your typical journal article. ![]() He's the Stevenson professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. ![]() I mean they've got pretty much every trick in the book down. Kenneth Catania: It's almost as if these electric eels have taken a course in physics. Steve Mirsky:Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on June 27, 2016. ![]()
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