תשובה מוסמכת באנגלית

Do fish die from electrocution when lightning strikes the sea?
So in the unusual event that lightning does in fact strike the sea, do fish get electrocuted? Apparently not, unlike air, the sea is a very good conductor as it contains salt. Rather than creating an direct narrow, path concentrating the "punch", the charge from the lightning strike spreads out sideways and downwards in an expanding half sphere from the surface. Any fish within a few meters of the strike area would probably be killed but beyond that they would probably just feel a tingle. Fish also tend to be a bit deeper in the water and not at the surface where the current is concentrated. So again, the odds are well stacked in favor of the fish. So technically yes, if the fish is right there in the immediate area of the strike and in shallow water, the fish probably will be electrocuted, but only fish in a very small area near the surface. Glad we got that part of it answered.

What about animals at the surface like whales and dolphins?
So if fish are saved because they generally hang around a bit deeper than the surface of the sea, what happens to animals like whales and dolphins who are on the surface a lot and have a large surface area when lightning strikes? Well, we searched and could not find any direct evidence of this happening in the past. Although biologists agree that it is entirely possible that marine mammals do get killed by lightning. Some clever fella with way too much time on his hands done some math. He took the average strikes across the worlds oceans, compared it the surface area of the oceans, the number of whales estimated in the ocean, the time the are at the surface etc... and to cut a long story short, he reckons, yes, statistically whales must have been killed by lightning many times in the past few thousand years. But this is just a statistical probability, not much hard evidence out there for this.