The electric eel is one of several species of fish in South America that generate electricity to navigate, communicate, hunt or defend themselves and fish in Africa independently evolved electric organs that are strikingly similar. Via QuantaMagazine
For more recent ancestors of today’s freshwater electric fish, which are teleosts, the duplication meant that they had an extra copy of a gene for an important sodium pump. One copy continued to work in muscle cells; the second acquired mutations that conferred distinctive electrical properties on electrocytes.
In the muscle tissue of the African fish, the sodium-pump gene was still functional, but like a lock with no key, it could not activate without helper molecules that muscle tissue did not make. In most of the South American fish, the pump was just missing from the muscles—the sodium-pump gene was largely inactive because it was missing an essential control element that specifically boosts the expression of the sodium pump in muscle.
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