Study
The electric sense of sharks and rays
Kalmijn, Adrianus J.
Journal of Experimental Biology, 1971
Sharks and rays were presented with live flatfish buried in sand, with the same fish buried inside an agar chamber that blocked odour but passed electric fields, and with electrodes reproducing the fish’s bioelectric field with no fish present.
- Studied in
- Scyliorhinus canicula, Raja clavata
- Sample size
- behavioural trials with buried prey and electrode substitutes
Predators attacked the agar-covered fish and the bare electrodes as readily as the buried fish, and preferred the electrodes to a source of fish odour, showing that the final strike is guided by weak bioelectric fields.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Sharks and rays detect the minute electric fields produced by living animals and use them to locate hidden prey at close range.
How NatureHQ reads it
The electrode condition is what makes this decisive: an animal attacking a pair of wires that smell of nothing is not responding to anything but the field. The result also fixes the *range* of the sense, which popular accounts routinely inflate — electroreception works over centimetres, not miles, and it takes over at the end of a hunt that smell and hearing began.
- Two small benthic species; sensitivity and use vary widely across sharks.
- Tank conditions have unusually low electrical noise compared with the open sea.
- Establishes detection and orientation, not the neural mechanism.
Sharks attacking a pair of wires
Sharks find prey buried in sand where they cannot see or smell it. What are they detecting?
Hiding a live fish inside a block of jelly
When a shark finds a flatfish buried in sand, what is it actually responding to?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Sharks
A shark can find a hidden fish by the faint electricity its body gives off
Sharks
A shark embryo freezes when it senses a predator’s electric field — inside the egg
Animal senses
The five senses are a list from classical philosophy, not a finding. Electric fields, magnetic fields, water flow, polarised light and radiant heat all have receptors that fit none of them.
Electroreception
Muscles and gills produce weak electric fields as a by-product of working. In water, which conducts, that makes hiding much harder than it looks.
Published by: The Company of BiologistsPublished by The Company of Biologists.
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.