Electricity.

It’s hard to imagine modern life without the stuff. It heats, cools, and lights up our homes and businesses, reduces the chaos of transportation, and because it powers technologies that allow for communication across vast geographic areas, it is the lifeblood of the Information Age. Over time, we’ve discovered that the utility of electricity is ludicrously diverse; from keeping food cold enough to prolong preservation, to saving lives through defibrillation of the heart, to being a dick to your friends. The fact that I am currently writing this on a laptop computer, and then disseminating the information in it over the medium of the Internet, is an undeniable consequence of humankind’s harnessing of electrical energy.

If you are inclined to think of the control and use of electrical energy as a human “invention”, then prepare to set your anthropocentrism…and perhaps yarns telling of curious, bespectacled statesmen armed with kites and keys…aside. Humans are far behind the curve, by many millions of years, on this front once the rest of the animal kingdom is considered, because just like with light (which I’ve talked about before), many animals can produce their own electricity.The overwhelming majority of these animals are at least partially aquatic, since water is a far better conductor of electricity than air. Of these gifted organisms, the bulk of them are vertebrates, and in particular, among our finned and gilled friends, the fishes. There are some mammalian exceptions, including monotremes (the platypus and echidna) and perhaps a species of dolphin or two, but by and large, it’s fish that have locked down this electricity thing. Volta, Tesla, and Edison were great and all, but the reality is that animals not too distantly related to the flaky goodness in your Gorton’s fishsticks had them solidly beat by eons, evolving a commanding grasp of the power of electricity right into their bodies.

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