If the Eel is the positive terminal, where’s the negative terminal? If you’re grounded by the water, would that mean the Eel can only shock you if you are in the water too? If the water is the final destination, why wouldn’t the current directly go from the Eel to the water? Why would it take a high resistance path through your body?
In: Physics
The head of the eel is positive, the tail is negative. You can think of them as like a temporary battery when they are zapping something.
When eels are hunting, they generally just produce positive voltage in the head, which spreads out around them in the water to ground and induces muscle twitches in fish in the field, allowing them to be caught and eaten.
When an eel wants to zap struggling prey to stun it, they curl around to put the prey between head and tail to zap the crap out of it
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0960982215011471-gr2.jpg
When an eel wants to really damage a big predator, they tend to leap partly out of the water and touch their head to the animal, creating a circuit through the animal from head to critter to water to tail, again delivering maximum shock.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319854986/figure/fig1/AS:869115212349441@1584224622974/Attack-on-a-Human-and-the-Paradigm-for-Circuit-Analysis-Electric-eel-attack-and.png
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