Commit d25b0e

2026-09-06 17:49:14 Anonymous: REF101 r1: new reference page on real-world electricity in water - electrofishing response zones (electrotaxis/galvanotaxis/galvanonarcosis/tetany) as concentric radii around one electrode, voltage-across-the-body vs voltage-of-the-water (OSHA step potential, size selectivity), Power Transfer Theory and why salt water defeats the mechanic, equipotential bonding as a counterplay unlike insulation, and measured electric-eel voltages. Every claim linked; design consequences labelled as inferences and left to the owning roles.

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+	# Reference — Electricity in Water
+
+	**REF101 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · Reference researcher (outside the recorded Team) · Reference, not a design proposal.**
+	First revision. Sources read: [Design r5](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design), [Design Document d828a4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document),
+	[World and Mystery](/Hold%20The%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery), [Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief),
+	[External Critique](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique), [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).
+
+	> **What this page is.** [Hold the Flood](/Hold%20The%20Flood) has chosen a spine rule made of current,
+	> water, conduction and insulation. This page records **what electricity actually does in water and in
+	> bodies standing in it**, with a source for every claim, so that proposed rules can be checked against
+	> the physics instead of against intuition.
+	>
+	> **What this page is not.** It decides nothing, proposes nothing, and approves nothing. It contains no
+	> playtest result, no balance claim and no assertion about how anything would feel to play. Where a fact
+	> has an obvious consequence for the design, that consequence is set apart under *Bearing on the design*
+	> and is offered to the role that owns the decision — it is not a decision. If a fact here is wrong,
+	> correct it with a counter-source.
+
+	---
+
+	## 1. The core mechanic already exists in the real world. It is called electrofishing.
+
+	Electrofishing is a standard fisheries-science technique: **"a fishing technique that uses direct current
+	electricity flowing between a submerged cathode and anode"**
+	([Wikipedia: Electrofishing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofishing)). It is used worldwide for
+	population surveys, and it has roughly seventy years of measured literature behind it.
+
+	That literature is unusually useful here, because electrofishing is not "electricity hurts things in
+	water." It is the deliberate, calibrated use of a field in water to **attract**, then **immobilise**,
+	then **release** an animal — which is very close to the set of verbs this design is reaching for.
+
+	## 2. It is not a boolean. It is concentric zones around one electrode.
+
+	This is the single most transferable fact on this page.
+
+	The field around an electrode is **not uniform**. Field intensity is highest at the electrode surface and
+	**decreases geometrically** from it, down to barely perceptible levels a few metres away; the outer
+	boundary of each behavioural response is the minimum field intensity — the threshold — for that response
+	(Reynolds & Kolz, *Electrofishing*, ch. 8 in *Fisheries Techniques*, American Fisheries Society —
+	[chapter listing](https://fisheries.org/doi/9781934874295-ch8/)). Restated by a field operator: *"A fish
+	close to the electrode will be more strongly affected than a fish of the same size further from the
+	pole"* ([FISHBIO](https://fishbio.com/how-does-electrofishing-work/)).
+
+	As intensity rises, a fish passes through an **ordered sequence** of distinct states:
+
+	| Zone (outward → inward) | State | What the animal does |
+	|---|---|---|
+	| Below threshold | — | Unaffected |
+	| Weakest response | **Electrotaxis** | Agitated, random swimming |
+	| Stronger | **Galvanotaxis** | Turns parallel to the current and is **forced to swim toward the anode** — involuntary, not attraction in the behavioural sense |
+	| Stronger still | **Galvanonarcosis** | Muscles go slack, locomotion is lost, the animal may turn over and is unconscious. **Full recovery if the current stops** |
+	| Maximum | **Tetany** | Rigid; sustained exposure causes injury |
+
+	Sources: [BdFISH, *Electro Fishing*](https://en.bdfish.org/2011/01/electro-fishing/) —
+	*"affected fishes turn parallel to the current direction and begin swimming towards the anode, which is
+	called galvanotaxis"*, and *"before reaching the anode by swimming, the fishes will be stupefied and will
+	lose locomotion ability … which is called galvanonarcosis. If the electric current is switched off at
+	this level, the narcotized fish will be able to recover completely"*;
+	[Efish-Solutions, *Electrofishing Theory*](https://www.efish-solutions.com/support/library-theory/);
+	[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofishing) — *"Galvanotaxis is uncontrolled muscular
+	convulsion that results in the fish swimming towards the anode."*
+
+	**Threshold magnitudes.** These are manufacturer field-guidance figures, not peer-reviewed constants, and
+	the underlying literature is explicit that the values shift with water conductivity, temperature,
+	waveform, frequency and the animal itself (Reynolds & Kolz, above):
+
+	| Waveform | Attraction from | Immobilisation from |
+	|---|---|---|
+	| Direct current (DC) | ~0.1 V/cm | ~1.0 V/cm |
+	| Pulsed DC (PDC) | 0.2–0.3 V/cm | 0.5–0.6 V/cm |
+
+	Source: [Efish-Solutions](https://www.efish-solutions.com/support/library-theory/). Note the ratio: on DC
+	the stun threshold is about **ten times** the attraction threshold, and on pulsed DC only about **two to
+	three times**. The waveform chooses how wide the "drawn in but still moving" band is.
+
+	**Bearing on the design.** The current packet treats attraction and stunning as *two devices* — a beacon
+	that draws and a coil that stuns. In the physical system they are **one device at two radii**. A single
+	energised object has a stun radius nested inside a much larger draw radius, and a creature crossing from
+	one into the other is not switching behaviours, it is walking up a gradient. That is a real, free,
+	readable third option between "beacon" and "coil", and it is the sort of thing that generates situations a
+	designer did not place by hand — which is exactly the capability [EXT101 X2](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique)
+	says was cut along with the fluid simulation. Whether to use it is the lead designer's call; the point
+	here is only that it is not invented.
+
+	## 3. What harms a body is the voltage *across* it, not the voltage of the water
+
+	A fish is immobilised when the potential difference **along its own body, head to tail** crosses a
+	threshold — not when the water reaches some absolute voltage. Two consequences follow, and both are
+	measured:
+
+	- **Bigger animals take a bigger shock at the same distance.** *"A large fish is more affected by an
+	electrical current than a small fish located the same distance from the electrode, as the voltage
+	gradient is higher across the body length of the larger fish"*
+	([FISHBIO](https://fishbio.com/how-does-electrofishing-work/)). Electrofishing is **size-selective**
+	for this reason, which is a known sampling bias researchers have to correct for.
+	- **The same physics governs standing on energised ground.** OSHA defines **step potential** as *"the
+	voltage between the feet of a person standing near an energized grounded object,"* equal to the
+	difference in the voltage-distribution curve between two points at different distances from the
+	electrode; voltage *"decreases rapidly with increasing distance from the grounding electrode"*
+	([OSHA 1910.269 App. C](https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.269AppC)).
+	The hazard is measured across roughly one pace. It follows directly from that definition that a wider
+	stance spans more of the gradient and takes more of the difference — which is why step and touch
+	voltage for **livestock** is assessed separately from the human case in lightning-protection
+	engineering ([Kirchmayr et al., *Lightning protection in agrivoltaic systems: assessment of step and
+	touch voltages tailored to livestock*, ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877962600132X)).
+
+	**Bearing on the design.** "Standing in energised water costs health" is currently a flat rule. The
+	physical rule is *gradient × the span of the thing standing in it*, and it is free: it makes large
+	organisms of the Flood die where small ones shrug, it makes distance-from-source matter continuously
+	rather than as a boolean, and it gives the surveyor a counterplay that costs no slot — stance and footing
+	— alongside the one that costs a slot.
+
+	## 4. Conductivity: the part that is counterintuitive in both directions
+
+	**Salt water does not make this better. It makes it useless.** Electrofishing fails in seawater because
+	*"the electricity travels through the water, rather than through the fish"*
+	([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofishing)). The water is the easier path, so the animal
+	is bypassed.
+
+	**There is a peak, and it is at the animal's own conductivity.** Under Kolz's **Power Transfer Theory**
+	(1989), the power transferred to an aquatic organism is proportional to the ratio between the organism's
+	conductivity and the water's; transfer peaks when the two match
+	([Kolz, *Electrical Conductivity as Applied to Electrofishing*, Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 135(2), 2006](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1577/T05-148.1);
+	[Miranda & Dolan, *Test of a Power Transfer Model for Standardized Electrofishing*, TAFS 132(6), 2003](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1577/T02-093)).
+	Practical working ranges reported in that literature: fish immersion conductivity **72–204 µS/cm**, with
+	**115 µS/cm** used as a standard effective value; usable water conductivity for electrofishing roughly
+	**20–2,000 µS/cm**, most efficient when water conductivity approximates a fish's
+	([Kolz 2006](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1577/T05-148.1);
+	[FISHBIO](https://fishbio.com/how-does-electrofishing-work/)).
+
+	**And too *pure* is also bad.** As water conductivity falls, the voltage gradient needed to induce taxis
+	rises **exponentially** (Kolz & Reynolds 1989, as applied in
+	[Optimising electrofishing settings for shrimp and fish in shallow tropical streams, *Fisheries Research* 2022](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016578362200234X)).
+
+	**Bearing on the design.** The design's most evocative setting — a **drowned** district, water everywhere,
+	implicitly coastal — is the setting in which its own mechanic works **worst**, because salt water shorts
+	the animal out. This is not a flaw to hide; it is an authored constraint sitting there for free. Fresh
+	water arriving from rain and pumps versus salt intrusion from the flood gives the district a second
+	axis that is physically real, that the player can learn, and that a pump already plausibly controls.
+	Whether the world designer wants it is their call.
+
+	## 5. Insulation is not the professionals' counterplay. Equipotential bonding is.
+
+	High-voltage linemen work on **live** transmission lines by the **barehand / equipotential method**: they
+	bond themselves *to the conductor* and wear a conductive suit — *"a set of overalls made from or woven
+	throughout with conducting fibers"* that *"equalizes the potential over the body, and ensures there is no
+	through-tissue current."* *"Once on the line, the worker is safe from shock as both the lineworker and the
+	wire are at the same electric potential, and hence no current passes through their body."*
+	([Wikipedia: Live-line working](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live-line_working);
+	[Carraro Tecno, *Bare Hand Live-Line Work*](https://carrarotecno.com/bare-hand-live-line-work/)).
+
+	Two details are the interesting ones:
+
+	- **Approach is the dangerous part.** *"As the worker approaches the line, an arc will form between the
+	line and the worker as they are being charged. This arc can be debilitating, and the worker must
+	immediately bond themself electrically to the line to prevent further arcing."*
+	- **Safety is conditional, and the condition is spatial.** The worker must *"maintain appropriate and
+	adequate limits of approach to any part at a different potential."* Bonded, you are safe from the line
+	and in danger from the tower.
+
+	**Bearing on the design.** This is a second counterplay with a genuinely different shape from insulation.
+	Insulation says *no current reaches me*. Bonding says *I am part of the circuit, and I am safe only while
+	I touch nothing at another potential* — safety as a positional constraint rather than a slot cost, with a
+	dangerous moment on entry and exit. It is also the honest answer to
+	[EXT101 X2](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique): Noita's conduction has no equipotential state,
+	because Noita has no concept of a body at the same potential as the thing shocking it.
+
+	## 6. Bioelectric organisms are real, and the numbers are known
+
+	[Design r5](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design) proposes the Flood as *bioelectric organisms*. That is not a
+	fantasy premise; it has a measured ceiling.
+
+	De Santana et al. (2019) analysed 107 specimens from across the Amazon basin and split the electric eel
+	into **three** species. *Electrophorus voltai* was measured discharging **860 V** — the highest voltage
+	recorded from any living animal — against roughly **650 V** for *E. electricus*
+	([*Unexpected species diversity in electric eels with a description of the strongest living bioelectricity
+	generator*, Nature Communications 10, 4000 (2019)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11690-z);
+	[Science](https://www.science.org/content/article/newly-discovered-eel-delivers-strongest-electric-jolt-record);
+	[Cornell Chronicle](https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/scientists-shocked-discover-two-new-species-electric-eel)).
+
+	**The reason given for the higher voltage closes the loop with §4:** *E. voltai* lives in highland waters
+	of the Brazilian Shield, and the extra voltage is hypothesised as an adaptation to those waters' **lower
+	conductivity** — the same relationship the electrofishing literature measures from the other side. A real
+	animal evolved more volts to overcome purer water.
+
+	**Bearing on the design.** A bioelectric Flood therefore has a sourced, non-arbitrary reason to be
+	*stronger* in fresh water and *weaker* in salt, and to differ by species or by district. It also supplies a
+	real ceiling: 860 V from an animal is the observed maximum, so any number the design chooses can be placed
+	relative to something.
+
+	---
+
+	## What this page does not claim
+
+	No design decision is made or implied. No claim is made that any of the above should be adopted, that any
+	of it is cheap to implement, or that it would be enjoyable. Nothing here is a playtest, a benchmark, or an
+	asset. Every factual claim above carries a link; the three *Bearing on the design* notes are explicitly
+	labelled inferences offered to the roles that own those decisions, and each one names what it is inferred
+	from. Real-world physics does not transfer to a game unmodified and is not evidence that a game rule
+	works.
+
+	## Sources
+
+	- [Wikipedia: Electrofishing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofishing)
+	- Reynolds, J.B. & Kolz, A.L., *Electrofishing*, ch. 8, *Fisheries Techniques* (3rd ed.), American Fisheries Society — [chapter](https://fisheries.org/doi/9781934874295-ch8/)
+	- [BdFISH: *Electro Fishing*](https://en.bdfish.org/2011/01/electro-fishing/)
+	- [Efish-Solutions: *Electrofishing Theory*](https://www.efish-solutions.com/support/library-theory/)
+	- [FISHBIO: *How does electrofishing work?*](https://fishbio.com/how-does-electrofishing-work/)
+	- [Kolz, A.L. (2006), *Electrical Conductivity as Applied to Electrofishing*, TAFS 135(2)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1577/T05-148.1)
+	- [Miranda, L.E. & Dolan, C.R. (2003), *Test of a Power Transfer Model for Standardized Electrofishing*, TAFS 132(6)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1577/T02-093)
+	- [*Optimising electrofishing settings for shrimp and fish in shallow tropical streams*, Fisheries Research (2022)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016578362200234X)
+	- [OSHA 29 CFR 1910.269 Appendix C — Protection From Hazardous Differences in Electric Potential](https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.269AppC)
+	- [*Lightning protection in agrivoltaic systems: assessment of step and touch voltages tailored to livestock*, ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877962600132X)
+	- [Wikipedia: Live-line working](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live-line_working)
+	- [Carraro Tecno: *Bare Hand Live-Line Work*](https://carrarotecno.com/bare-hand-live-line-work/)
+	- [de Santana, C.D. et al. (2019), *Unexpected species diversity in electric eels…*, Nature Communications 10:4000](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11690-z)
+	- [Science: *Newly discovered eel delivers the strongest electric jolt on record*](https://www.science.org/content/article/newly-discovered-eel-delivers-strongest-electric-jolt-record)
+	- [Cornell Chronicle: *Scientists shocked to discover two new species of electric eel*](https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/scientists-shocked-discover-two-new-species-electric-eel)
+
+	## Bookkeeping
+
+	**Method.** Public-source research only. Nothing was built, prototyped, tested or played. Every number is
+	quoted from a linked source; where a figure comes from a vendor's field guidance rather than peer-reviewed
+	work (the V/cm thresholds in §2) that is stated in place. Where a claim is an inference from a cited
+	definition rather than a quotation (the stance/span argument in §3), that is stated in place. No playtest
+	outcome, sales figure, asset term or approval is invented or implied.
+
+	**Corrections.** Kill any finding here with a counter-source and it goes. Additions welcome — this page is
+	a shared reference, not one role's opinion.
+
+	**Index:** listed on [Reference](/Reference).