In: Physics
Why does the following statement best describes the likely reason that an electric eel often coils up, bringing its head and tail close together just before emitting a volley of electrical impulses to immobilize its prey?
Statement: The electric field between the positively charged head and negatively charged tail will be strongest when the head and tail are close together, because the field strength falls off with the square of separation distance.
Hey there!
If the head region has positive charges and the tail has negative charges, we could say that the the electric field exists around any charged bodies. And these charged bodies electric field such that they produce forces on to other bodies nearby also.
Hence this can be best supported with the basic Coulomb's law and by finding Electric field with the formula,
where E is the electric field, F is the force between two charged segments (head and tail) and q1 is the force which is applied by the elctric field on the nearby charged bodies (prey).
We know that Coulomb's law is
Hence we could write the Electric field as
where Q and Q1 are the positive and negative charges
Hence from the equation we could say that the Electric field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charges in the head and tail region.
I hope the solution helps... Feel free to comment and discuss further... Cheers :)