---
title: Electric ray (Torpedinidae)
scientific_name: Torpedinidae
common_name: Electric ray
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:28:58.977Z
tags: Electric ray, Torpedinidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray
---

# Electric ray (*Torpedinidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Torpedinidae
- **Body shape:** Flattened - Pressed flat top-to-bottom, lies on the bottom - rays, flounders, crocodilefishes.
- **Species listed here:** 4

## How to recognise this group

- broad, flattened, rounded or oval body disc
- small eyes on top of disc
- smooth-looking skin
- often partially buried in sand or silt

The two kidney-shaped organs behind a torpedo's eyes are a battery, and they are built the way a battery is built. Each one is a block of columns, and each column is a stack of flattened cells that were muscle before evolution took away the contraction and kept the electrical part. A single cell produces a fraction of a volt. Stack them face to face in series, hundreds deep, and the fractions add; run the columns side by side and you get the current to go with the voltage. What comes out is a pulse of a couple of hundred volts from an animal you could hold in two hands.

It hunts with it. This is a soft, slow ray with no barb and no teeth worth the name, lying half buried in silt, and its method is to rise over a fish and fire, hitting the prey's own muscles directly and then working the stunned fish into its mouth with the disc. The same discharge answers anything that leans on it, and it needs no contact at all, because the current travels through seawater. A hand put down near a buried torpedo is close enough.

People have been using that shock for a very long time. Scribonius Largus, a physician at the court of the emperor Claudius, wrote the prescription down: a patient with gout or a stubborn headache should stand on a live torpedo at the water's edge until the numbness climbed the leg. The Latin torpere, to go stiff, gave the fish its name, and the fish later gave its name to the naval weapon. It also gave up the chemistry of the nervous system. An electric organ is nothing but nerve-to-muscle junctions packed at enormous density, which made it the tissue in which the receptor those junctions use was first isolated, and much of what is known about how a nerve talks to a muscle was worked out on this animal.

Encounters are uncommon and almost always accidental. Torpedoes lie in silt and sand away from the coral, mostly active at night, and the leopard torpedo is the one usually found on this coast. Do not put a hand or a knee down on a patch of sand you have not looked at first.


## Species (4)

- [Ben-Tuvia’s Sleeper Ray (Heteronarce bentuviai)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray/ben-tuvias-sleeper-ray)
- [Gulf Torpedo (Torpedo sinuspersici)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray/gulf-torpedo)
- [Leopard Torpedo Ray (Torpedo panthera)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray/leopard-torpedo-ray)
- [Marbled Electric Ray (Torpedo marmorata)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray/marbled-electric-ray)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/electric-ray)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*