Carl Sachs

 ( 1878 Deaths ) 

While in the Llanos, he used Cane toad instead of the frogs that du Bois-Reymond's laboratory normally employed to detect electrical activity from electric fish. Sachs studied the electric eel's seeming immunity to its own shocks, and to electricity applied to it. He found that electric eel muscles, when removed from the fish, twitched in the usual way in response to an electric shock. He demonstrated that a discharge could be triggered by stimulating the nerve to the electric organs; and that such a discharge could be blocked with the arrow poison curare. He observed that electric eels gather in groups as water levels fall in the dry season. Abstracts in English.

File:Sachs on Electric Eel 1877.png|Sachs' illustration of what is now called Sachs's organ (in black at 6) in the electric eel, with electric organ discharge patterns (4, 5, 8), 1877 File:Sachs sections and anatomy of electric eel 1881.jpg|Sections and anatomy of electric eel, published posthumously by Sach's employer, Emil du Bois-Reymond, in 1881

Sachs produced an accurate Anatomy description of "Sachs's organ", the smallest of the electric eel's three electric organs. He tried to bring six of the fish home on his return journey across the Atlantic, but one died on the voyage back to the port of Bremen, and the rest were harmed on the train journey to Berlin. Accordingly his researches on these specimens were limited to anatomy.