Monday 5 May 2014

Electric fish

Two New Electric Fish Species Discovered!!!

Petrocephalus are African weakly fishes of the family Mormyridae that produce pulses of only a few hundred millivolts from an organ made of modified muscle cells in front of their tail.

Receptor cells on the fishes’ skin detect distortions to the electric field created by nearby objects in the water. In this way, they are able to electrolocate through their complex aquatic environment at night. Their short electric pulses, too weak to be sensed by touch, are also used to communicate the sender’s species identity and gender to other electric fishes.
On a 2010 field trip to the Congo River of Democratic Republic of the Congo, ichthyologists Dr Sébastien Lavoué from the Taiwan Institute of Oceanography and Dr John Sullivan from Cornell University captured a single individual of the genus Petrocephalus not quite like any they had seen before.

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