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The electric sea eel was a cryptid reported from the South Pacific Ocean, around eastern Australia's Great Barrier Reef and unspecified island reefs.[1]:304
Attestations[]
Naturalist William Saville-Kent, who worked in eastern Australia as a fisheries inspector, received reports and rumours of electric eels from the Great Barrier Reef and "the reefs in the vicinity of the South Sea Islands;" the island reports were better-attested. They were described as small eels, with "very pronounced electric properties."[1]:304 The existence of electric eels around the Great Barrier Reef was later claimed by Australian opal and pearl magnate Percival B. Prior.[2]
Sightings[]
Prior collected two accounts of electric eel encounters in the Great Barrier Reef. One claim concerned an Aboriginal pearl diver who received a severe shock from an eel while underwater: he received medical attention, but had to be tied down due to his violent "struggles," and allegedly died within two days. An Australian sea fisherman who caught and touched an electric eel reportedly received a shock which left him "in a fit of mania" for several weeks, but did not kill him.[2]
Theories[]
True electric eels, which taxonomically are only distantly related to eels, are freshwater fishes endemic to the river basins of northern South America, although freshwater electric eels were also vaguely reported from New Zealand. While other electrogenic freshwater fishes exist, the only known marine fishes capable of generating significant electrical currents are the electric rays, such as torpedos, and the stargazers;[3]:276-277 several species of the former group are known from the Great Barrier Reef.[4]:27-29 The electric eel was explicitly described as a small eel by Saville-Kent and Prior, although Prior himself also regarded the stingaree, a form of ray, as "eel-like".[2]
See also[]
- Tuoro
- Yoli
- Super-moray
Notes and references[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Saville-Kent, William (1893) The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, Allen
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Prior, Percival B. "Monsters of the Deep That Pearl Divers Have to Contend With," The Jeweler's Circular, Vol. 95, No. 1 (August 1927)
- ↑ Burton, Derek & Burton, Margaret (2018) Essential Fish Biology: Diversity, Structure and Function, Oxford University Press
- ↑ Randall, John E. et al. (1997) Fishes of the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea, University of Hawaii Press