electric eel Christmas tree

[Aaroncboo1]

I have read some posts about how the Japanese have a Christmas tree powered by electric eel from what I understand the tree was powered by a plug-in and the electric eel made lights flicker but I was wondering how they would do this? how would you wire something up like that? I have an electric eel about three feet long and would like to attempt the same thing if I could but I'm not good enough with electrics to figure something like that out... any help would be awesome!

 

[HumanBean]

Politely speaking not a very good idea. Fish never appreciate any foreign body attached to them. And you won't get an electric discharge unless you touch the cat fish .

 

[Aaroncboo1]

No I'm sorry if it came out squirrely. There's nothing attached to the fish. The tree was plugged in to the wall and electric probes in the water made the tree flicker.

 

[Betta132]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...e-powered-byan-electric-eel-171582707/?no-ist
Apparently there are two probes in the tank that use the eel's electrical field to flicker the lights. Since the eel gives off electrical pulses while moving, to help itself navigate, nobody has to bother the eel to make the tree flicker. Pretty cool.
Looks like the eel in the article is larger than 3' long, though.

 

[moe214]

It's like a conductivity test, I did this recently in chemistry class for a lab experiment. We added a crystal lattice (salt) to water making a solution which lit up the light bulb which I assume it's something similar. We also had to plug it in.

 

[Aaroncboo1]

Ya It's one of those weird you need to be good in electronics kind of things to be able to understand how everything works.

 

[Fat Homer]

i'm guessing because Christmas tree lights normally run on LED's you don't actually need too much power to light them up, which is why they can do it so effectively... although at the same time i would imagine how much water is in the tank may effect how well the electricity is being conducted...

As far as the electronics go though, i'm presuming they connected each of the wires from the probes to the wires on the Christmas lights, which in theory shouldn't be too hard to achieve? Since wouldn't it be a matter of just removing the plug and then re-wiring the exposed wires to the probe wires?

 

[Tech]

It looks like the probes just measure the voltage level in the tank which is translated through their sequencer to run the lights. The electricity generated by the eel is the trigger for the lights but it's not running them.

You can see a lit bar display above the tank in the video which represents the instantaneous voltage in the tank which matches the eels movements.