Ken Catania

Media Appearances

• The strange life of the star condylure, the only mole able to hunt underwater

  That's just a sampling of the incredible things the stellate condylus is capable of, says Kenneth Catania , a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. "If I often use the word 'incredible', it's because that's really what these animals inspire in me," he explains. In fact, he used that word ten times to describe them during our conversation.

  February 15th, 2022

• You asked. Ars answers. Here’s how to give an electric eel an MRI

  It's that ability that makes giving the creatures an MRI tricky. According to Vanderbilt University biologist and neuroscientist Kenneth Catania, the creatures can vary the degree of voltage in their electrical discharges, using lower voltages (around 10 or 12 volts, akin to a car battery) for sensing their environment, navigating, and hunting. "They live in murky waters where there's not much light or visibility," Van Bonn told Ars, which is why they have such tiny eyes. The eels use higher voltages (100 volts per foot of animal, typically amounting to between 400 and 500 volts) to stun and kill prey.

  December 14th, 2021

• The Speedy, Super-Sensitive Snouts Of Star-Nosed Moles

  They might look like something out of science fiction, but star-nosed moles are real-life creatures that can be found along the East Coast, including in Connecticut. These small, furry mammals are a bit larger than a house mouse and live underground in wetlands, digging tunnels with their enormous claws. But their most distinctive feature is their pink, star-shaped nose. Ken Catania, Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University, has studied the neurobiology of the star-nosed mole’s strange snout for decades. He told Where We Live about the science behind these incredible creatures.

  January 24th, 2020

• The Wasp Wants a Zombie. The Cockroach Says ‘No’ With a Karate Kick.

  Like a handler leading a horse, the wasp grabs hold of the roach’s antenna and steers it into a hole. There, it lays an egg on the roach that eventually hatches into a hungry larva that chows down on the cockroach. When the baby matures, it bursts from the roach’s chest ready to continue the gruesome ritual. “It’s kind of straight out of Alien,” said Kenneth Catania, a biologist from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, “and it’s about the only thing I can think of that’ll make you feel sorry for a cockroach.”

  November 27th, 2018

• How to Not Become a Zombie, Using Martial Arts

  A neurobiologist at Vanderbilt University, Catania has a track record of investigating unusual animals, many of which he studies single-handedly. He has worked on star-nosed moles, tentacled snakes, naked mole rats, electric eels, crocodiles, and, er, humans. “I like getting firsthand experience about the animals I find are most interesting,” he says. “I teach about the emerald cockroach wasp, so I went ahead and got some. I thought I would just start filming them to show students and flesh out my lectures, especially the Halloween one.” His videos, filmed at high speed, showed that the wasp’s attacks are all about the pronotum. If it gets its jaws on this plate, and delivers the first sting, “it’s game over,” says Catania. That happens roughly half the time without incident, usually when the wasp takes the cockroach unawares. But often, the cockroach defends itself.

  October 31st, 2018

• How cockroaches avoid becoming ‘zombies’ during wasp attacks

  Ken Catania, a biologist and professor at the school, videotaped interactions between the roaches and their predators — emerald jewel wasps — and studied their interactions. “It’s kind of a famous interaction in biology circles and beyond,” Catania told Fox News. An emerald jewel wasp will temporarily paralyze an American cockroach’s front legs and “weave its stinger through the cockroach’s throat into its brain,” essentially “zombifying” it, he explained.

  October 31st, 2018

• It's Like An 'Electric-Fence Sensation,' Says Scientist Who Let An Eel Shock His Arm

  Electric eels sometimes leap out of the water to increase the power of their jolt — and one scientist has been trying to understand this behavior more fully by letting a small eel repeatedly shock his arm. Ken Catania, a Vanderbilt University neurobiologist who has been studying electric eels in his lab, recently noticed something strange whenever he tried to fish them out with a net that had a metal rim and handle. The eels would leap out of the water to attack it. "Electric eels, in my experience, had never done something like that where they come out of the water, and they did it in a very directed way," he recalls.

  September 14th, 2017

• See a Biologist Brave Eel Shocks in the Name of Science

  You see, last year Catania showed that eels can leap from the water to deliver their strike to a would-be predator. In that experiment, he relied on a fake human hand to endure the electrical attacks. But Catania wanted to measure the actual power of an eel’s zap, and a prosthetic wouldn’t do. To quantify a real eel-to-human electrical circuit, he’d need to measure the resistance of real human skin. “Maybe I painted myself into a corner here, because I always tell my students to collect data rather than just making theoretical measurements,” says Catania, whose new study was published today in the journal Current Biology. “After using an arm prop in the last paper, it just seemed kind of like destiny.”

  September 14th, 2017