The advice I’ve heard is to squat, which makes you low and therefore a less attractive target for the lighting in the first place. In addition, keep your feet close together to minimize the step voltage between them, and touch your ankles to each other so that they provide a shorter path across your two feet than your thorax in the event that there actually is a strike near you.
Skin effect but there’s plenty of WAG on my part.
It’s normally most apparent at high frequencies and fast impulses. Lightning is fast for you & me but not compared to the coupling that occurs at even a modest 10 MHz. So there’d be some skin and zero in the up direction and the hemisphere gets pulled flatter, perhaps like a hemiSaturn. N/S, not E/W, lol.
Really? I would have thought that since seawater is such a good conductor, the electron repulsion would cause them to spread through the water in a hemispherical pattern. But I’m definitely no kind of electricity or lightning expert.
It applies exactly the same in principle. The current that flows through the fish depends on the potential difference between the different parts of the fish because that is what is going to cause current to flow through the fish. Theoretically, just like for Francis_Vaughan’s animals, a fish on facing in towards the strike will have a greater potential difference head to tail than a fish that is side on to the strike.
However, the advantage an ocean fish has is that it’s surrounded by a very good conductor. Which means that the potential difference in the seawater, along the length of the fish, is going to be lower than for the same length on land, because land is higher resistance.
Well… (contains a written-out swear word)
What were electric eels called before we discovered electricity?
Whatever the local natives called them. Europeans have always called them “electric”.
When the species now defined as Electrophorus electricus was described by Carl Linnaeus in 1766, based on early field research by Europeans in South America and specimens sent back to Europe for study,[3][4][5] he used the name Gymnotus electricus , placing it in the same genus as Gymnotus carapo (the banded knifefish).[6][7][8] He noted that the fish is from the rivers of Surinam, that it causes painful shocks, and that it had small pits around the head.[6][b]
Mmmm-mmm! Baked eel on toast. Probably real easy to spread too after the energy flux boils the innards and it bursts like an overcooked spud.
Huh. Didn’t realize electric eels weren’t universal.
As long as they have the right travel adapters they’ll be fine.
Hah! (Plus a Nice one! to please Discourse.)
Thinking how lightning striking the ocean may have been the impetus for biogenesis on this planet: when all the elements needed for life are present and get an energy input. Like the Miller-Urey experiment, combining methane and oxygen and giving it electric shocks until it formed amino acids.