• Episode 410: Electric Catfish

  • Dec 9 2024
  • Length: 7 mins
  • Podcast

Episode 410: Electric Catfish

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  • Thanks to Cosmo for suggesting this week's animal, the electric catfish! Further reading: The shocking truth about electric fish Efficient high-voltage protection in the electric catfish Gimme kiss [electric catfish photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re finally going to talk about a fish Cosmo wanted us to learn about, the electric catfish! Catfish are really common fish that live throughout the world, except for Antarctica. We’ve talked about various types of catfish in lots of different episodes, since there are well over 3,000 known species and they’re incredibly diverse. The electric catfish lives in freshwater in tropical areas in western and central Africa, as far north as the Nile River. All animals generate electric fields in their nerves and the contracting of muscles. Animals that can sense these fields are called electroreceptive. An electroreceptive animal can find hidden prey without using its other senses. Many electroreceptive animals can also generate weak electrical fields, usually less than a single volt—small electrical pulses or a sort of wave, depending on the species, that can give them information about their environment. Like a dolphin using echolocation, a fish using electro-location can sense where potential prey is, where predators, plants, and rocks are, and can even communicate with other fish of its same species. Of course, those same electric pulses can also attract electroreceptive predators. Some fish can generate an electric shock so strong it can stun or kill other animals. The most famous is the electric eel, which we talked about way back in episode 10, but the electric catfish falls in this category too. The electric catfish isn’t a single species but several in the family Malapteruridae. Some are very small, but one grows as much as four feet long, or 1.2 meters, and can weigh over 50 lbs, or 23 kg. That’s Malapterurus electricus, THE electric catfish. The electric catfish is grayish-brown mottled with black spots. Like a lot of catfish, it’s a cylinder-shaped chonk, and has three pairs of barbels around its broad mouth. Barbels are the feelers that give the catfish its name, because they look sort of like a cat’s whiskers. Sort of. Not actually very much like a cat’s whiskers. The electric catfish also has what look like surprisingly kissy lips, which are often pale in color so they stand out, especially when the mouth is open, which is frankly hilarious. It doesn’t have a dorsal fin and it’s not a fast swimmer. It spends most of its time lurking in rocky areas in muddy, slow-moving water. It’s also nocturnal. The electric catfish eats other fish, although it will also eat pretty much anything it can swallow. It likes muddy water because it doesn’t want potential prey to see it, and of course it doesn’t want any potential predators to see it either. That includes humans, who consider it a delicacy. Humans also sometimes keep electric catfish as aquarium fish, which is sort of the opposite of being killed and eaten. Contracting a muscle causes a tiny, tiny electrical impulse, as I mentioned earlier, but in electric fish certain muscles have developed the ability to generate much stronger electrical impulses. Instead of muscles, they’re called electric organs. The interesting thing is that this is only found in fish, but that the ability evolved separately at least six times in different lineages of fish. The electric catfish uses its ability to generate electric shocks as a defense when it needs to, but mainly it uses it to stun or outright kill other fish, which it then gulps down. It can discharge up to 300 volts of electricity in pulses that last only a few milliseconds, but since it can generate up to 500 pulses in waves, that’s a lot of electricity. That’s not enough to kill a person, but you’d definitely feel it and try to get away. But,
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