Nobody believed him, but he knew what he saw. In 1800 during an outing in the Amazon, Humboldt, wanting to catch some electric eels, led mounted men into a small, shallow lake to round them up. The eels, obviously fearing for their lives, leapt from the water to electrocute the horses! 

Alexander von Humboldt was a scientist ahead of his time, advancing an understanding of the nervous system, the earth’s magnetic field, geology, and topography, to name a few of the areas at which he excelled. Perhaps the fact that he was thought to be a radical led to the public doubt of his experience with the eels.

In the more than 200 years since, nobody believed his story. At least, not until now. Kenneth Catania at Vanderbilt University finally proved Humboldt was no teller of tales on the subject of leaping eels.

A shocking encounter

Catania was working with eels when he made the chance discovery (or rediscovery) that the eels leaping out of the water to attack his net were emitting a significant electric charge. On this leaping attack, Catania reports, “This behavior was both literally and figuratively shocking.”

Upon realizing the eels were indeed attacking while leaping out of water, he decided to conduct further experiments to detect the strength of the strikes. He found that, as the eels rose out of the water, the voltage of their strikes increased.

Through his experiments, Catania realized that the eels were bending in such a way as to be sure their chin would touch their bodies’ electrical conductors, thereby continuing to gain voltage as they travelled upward, striking as they rose.

Attacking in self-defense

Kenneth Catania believes Humboldt’s eels were already stressed out upon his arrival. He looked into the seasonal rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon and found that often, eels are trapped in small, isolated pools during the dry season, where males keep their growing babies safe. He supposes that Humboldt led his men and horses into such a pool where the eels had no place else to go and were forced to attack.

Only the eels?

How many other scientific discoveries have been ignored or forgotten because those who reported them were considered radical, unqualified, or untrustworthy? There are certainly others. Perhaps scientists today, as Kenneth Catania has done, should search history to rediscovered that which was buried when the world wasn’t ready for it. The leaping eels can’t be the only lost knowledge.