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    "headline": "Sharks and rays detect the electric fields of hidden prey through jelly-filled pores on their snouts",
    "description": "The pores, first described in the 1670s, register fields as weak as 5 nanovolts per centimeter, making sharks the most electrically sensitive animals known to science.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-09T13:53:00+00:00",
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    "articleBody": "A shark can pick up an electric field as weak as five billionths of a volt per centimeter, the sharpest sensitivity measured in any animal. It does this with a network of tiny jelly-filled pores around its snout and mouth, called the ampullae of Lorenzini. Look closely at a photo of a tiger shark’s face and those freckle-like dots are the sensor array. Every living creature leaks a little electricity, because muscles and nerves run on it. A fish hiding under sand can keep still and stay out of sight, but it cannot switch off the faint signal from its own body. Sharks and rays read that signal in the final stages of a strike. How small is five billionths of a volt? Try this comparison. An ordinary AA battery supplies 1.5 volts. Divide 1.5 volts by 5 nanovolts per centimeter and you get 300 million centimeters, or about 3,000 kilometers (roughly 1,860 miles). So the weakest field a shark can respond to is like one AA battery’s voltage stretched across a distance longer than the trip from New York to Denver. A rival makes the point nicely. The Guiana dolphin, one of the few mammals with an electric sense, has a threshold of 4.8 microvolts per centimeter. Against a shark’s 5 nanovolts, that is 960 times less sensitive. Inside a pore Each pore opens into a canal packed with gel, and the canal ends in a bulb lined with sensory cells. The gel is mostly water, about 97%, and carries charge unusually well. Canal walls resist current strongly, so nearly all the voltage difference between the outside of the skin and the bulb lands on a single layer of receptor cells. Those cells behave like tiny switches poised at their trigger point. A negative charge at the pore makes them fire faster; a positive charge slows them down. The brain then reads that change in tempo. The pores cluster around the snout and mouth. Sawfish, often treated as the specialists of the group, carry more of them than any other cartilaginous fish, with receptors spread along that long toothed rostrum. A 17th-century mystery The Italian physician Stefano Lorenzini described these organs in detail in the late 1670s while dissecting sharks. For nearly three centuries nobody knew their purpose. Over the years, candidates included temperature, pressure and salinity. In 1960, R. W. Murray established that they sense electricity. The trait turns out to be ancient. Sturgeons, paddlefish, coelacanths, lungfish and some salamanders have ampullae too, and the common ancestor of backboned animals likely did. Most bony fish lost them along the way, and water explains why the sense never caught on for land animals: air conducts electricity far too poorly. What we still don’t know Two further uses are under debate. A 2004 experiment trained around eight sharks to link a magnetic field with food, and they passed over the target spot far more often when the field came on. Because a moving body in a magnetic field generates a small voltage, the same pores could give sharks a sense of direction on long migrations. That remains a hypothesis. Temperature is the other open question. A 2003 proposal that the gel works as a heat sensor appeared to be knocked down by a 2007 study, then a 2023 prediction revived it, suggesting sharks could register a change of just 0.001 kelvin. Even the unborn get some use out of the system: some shark embryos and pups freeze when they detect the electric signature of a predator. Further reading Wikipedia: Ampullae of Lorenzini Wikipedia: Electroreception and electrogenesis Illustrative image. Image: Dennis Hipp (Zepto), CC0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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