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Electric Eel Shocks Like a Taser
Science_afficionado writes After a nine month study, a Vanderbilt biologist has determined that the electric eel emits series of millisecond, high-voltage pulses to paralyze its prey just before it attacks. The high-voltage pulses cause the motor neurons in its target to violently contract, leaving it temporarily immobilized in the same fashion as the high-voltage pulses produced by a Taser. He documented this effect using high-speed video. The eel, which is nocturnal and has very poor eyesight, also uses closely spaced pairs of high-voltage pulses when hunting for hidden prey. He determined that the pulses cause the prey's body to twitch which produces water movements that the eel uses to locate its position even when it's hidden from view.
The eel came first. Shouldnt the headline read tasers shock like eels?
I'm almost certain I read an interview with Jack Cover (one of the early inventors of these systems) in which he explicitly likened the effect to an electric eel, implying that may have been precisely on his mind when he developed the device although the similarity in the process at that point may just have been general.
-Styopa