Pacific electric ray, a fish that everyone knows about, but few actually see. Yes, this is THE electric ray, and they live here in the Salish Sea. Electric it certainly is, as it uses powerful electric jolts to subdue prey and drive off predators. A solitary and nocturnal fish, it’s electric blast can knock a person down. Their scientific name is “Torpedo californica”. Torpedo is certainly on the mark and it’s the only natural (endemic) electric ray on the West Coast. Found from Baja to British Columbia on sandy bottoms in shallow water and around kelp beds and rocky reefs. At 4 ½ feet long, it’s a sizeable predator and nothing to be messed with. Females bear litters (yes, that’s what they call them) of upwards of 20 ‘pups’.

So, here’s the electric shock part. An electric ray has two pairs organs, ‘battery banks’ in muscles filled with a jelly substance. They are hard ‘wired’ in parallel to amply the output and a large ray can generate up to 45 volts of electricity with an output of one full kilowatt – a lot! And, they can do this at a rate of 150 to 200 pulses per second. They have the capacity to put out over a thousand pulses before the batteries are depleted, more than enough to send any attacker fleeing – if it even survives at all. Most ray ‘hunting” is at night when they rise towards the surface to attack anything they find swimming, salmon among them. On the other side, there’s a record of an orca consuming one off Southern California. It’s an interesting fish swimming beneath your keel.

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