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Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on June 27, 2016. I'm Steve Mursky. On this episode, it's almost as if these electric yields have taken a course in physics. They've got

pretty much every trick in the book down. That's Kenneth Katanya. He's the Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt

University. And he's the author of a recent paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of

Science is titled Leaping Eels Electrify Threats, Supporting Von Holmboldt's Account of a Battle

with Horses. Not your typical journal article. So we had frequent six supporting von Holmboldt's account of a battle with horses.

Not your typical journal article.

So we had frequent 60 Second Science podcast contributor Cynthia Graber get in touch with Katania

to find out about these fantastical battles between electric eels and horses.

Here's Cynthia.

To set the stage for this research, who was Alexander von Humboldt, and what is his legendary

story about attacking eels?

So he was a famous naturalist, and he went on many different sort of adventures and field trips to sort of study nature. And one of

the most famous and longer ones was to South America. And at that time period, so this would

have been around 1800, he was really interested in following up on this mystery about what is electricity and is the kind of things that animals are giving off.

Is that the same thing as the electricity that you get out of a Leiden jar, for example?

So this is one of the many big questions and mysteries of the day.

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