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Electrofishing for Whales I used to work on a fisheries crew where we would use an electro-fisher backpack to momentarily stun small fish (30 - 100 mm length) so we could scoop them up with nets to identify and measure them. The larger fish tended to be stunned for slightly longer because of their larger surface area but I don't imagine this relationship would be maintained for very large animals. Could you electrofish for a blue whale? At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? —Madeline Cooper So you want to give endangered whales powerful electric shocks. Great! I'm happy to help. This is definitely a very normal thing to want to do. There are various electrofishing setups, but they all operate on the same general principle: An electric current flows through the water, and also through any fish that happen to be in the water. The electric current, through a few different physical effects, draws the fish toward one of the electrodes and/or stuns them. I'm just gonna set my drink on the safety switch so I can rest my eyes for a few. You have fun. For a long time, people didn't really notice that electrofishing injured fish at all. For the most part, stunned fish seemed to be fine after a few minutes. However, they frequently suffer from internal damage which isn't obvious from the outside. The electric current causes involuntary muscle spasms, which can fracture the fish's vertebrae. As this paper shows, these kinds of spinal injuries are more common and severe in larger fish. As you mention, for a given electrofishing setup, larger fish are usually more affected than smaller ones.[1] Why? Well, we don't know. In their comprehensive 2003 study Immobilization Thresholds of Electrofishing Relative to Fish Size, biologists Chad Dolan and Steve Miranda modeled the way electric currents stun fish of different sizes, but caution that "no adequate conceptual system exists to explain the effects of size on electroshock thresholds from the perspective of electric fields." None of these studies dealt with animals anywhere near the size of whales. The largest fish in Dolan and Miranda's study were still quite small. This experiment tested larger fish up to 80cm long,[2] but nothing whale-sized.[3] Since we don't know exactly why larger fish respond differently, it's hard to confidently extrapolate. Fish are typically[4] stunned by equipment delivering about 100 µW of power per cm3 of body volume, so for a whale, that would be about 20 megawatts. But there's a catch: Most electrofishing is done in fresh water. Unfortunately, blue whales live in the ocean,[5] where the salt water conducts electricity much more easily. That might seem like good news for our electrofishing plans, but it turns out to make it much more challenging. Electrofishing works best when the water and the target animals are about equally conductive. In highly conductive saltwater, most of the current flows past the animals in the water rather than through them. This means that ocean electrofishing requires much more power. Using our simple extrapolation, instead of 20 megawatts, we might need a gigawatt. In other words, you'll need to bring a large nuclear generating station. All right, I'm just gonna nap here, but let me know when you've ordered a container ship on Amazon or whatever. Simple extrapolation is misleading here, since we know that large animals respond to electricity differently. How differently? Well, according to an electrofishing.net post by Jan Dean, a human who fell into the water in front of a typical electrofishing boat could easily die.[6] Blue whales, which are even larger than humans,[citation needed] would presumably fare even worse. Now I want to manufacture tiny defibrillator paddles and mount them in busy coral reefs. Electrofishing temporarily stops a fish's heart.[7] The fish seem to recover, most of the time, but humans—and probably whales—have a harder time with cardiac arrest. It's possible that giving blue whales massive electrical shocks isn't as good an idea as it sounded at first. That's not to say there's no place in science for giving random electric shocks to large aquatic animals. A project at the Denver Wildlife Research Center used electrofishing-style equipment—linked to an infrared camera—to repel beavers, ducks, and geese from selected areas. Apparently, the results were "encouraging."[8] So electrofishing equipment probably can't help you catch blue whales. However, if you're having trouble keeping them out of your backyard pond ... Sure, kids, they look like cute pets when they're 5-ton calves, but before you know it they'll be 150-ton adults who need all your time and attention! ... it's possible the Denver Wildlife Research Center can help you out.

INTO JAPANESE

私は電気・ フィッシャーのバックパックを使用して、小さな魚 (30 〜 100 ミリメートルの長さ) を一瞬気絶させる我々 どこ漁業乗組員で働いていたクジラの魚網我々 は網を識別し、それらを測定すると、それらをすくい上げるでしたので。その大きな表面積のため少し長く唖然とする傾向に大きな魚がこの関係を想像していません。