We know very well that water is a good conductor of electricity, and situations like the one in the image below should always be avoided so that accidents do not happen. But how do fish survive during a lightning storm? They don't have the option of looking for shelter in a dry place, so how do they survive?

This is not the best way to have a pool barbecue

In fact, they can die electrocuted, but it's not that easy. The first reason is that lightning does not hit the water so much. In 2014, the Geophysical Research Journal published a map showing the location of lightning strikes over a 5-year period, and one finding was that they hit the earth 10 times more than oceans.

This makes sense by the way the rays form, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. Oceans receive as much sunlight as continental regions, but they warm faster, and this causes greater convection and instability in the atmosphere, making lightning and thunderstorms easier to generate.

NASA image also showing lightning incidence data

Even with a low incidence, lightning strikes the water. When this happens, the electric current tends to propagate only on the surface as well as on a metal, leaving the inner part intact. A body of water, when struck by lightning, acts like a Faraday cage, which keeps its interior free of electrical current, no matter how intense the discharge around it.

The main reason that fish do not die electrocuted is because they spend most of their time below the surface, not being affected by the electricity generated by the lightning on the surface. And that's the same reason we should get out of the water in a lightning storm: unlike fish, we spend most of our time on the surface, and a lightning strike near someone in these conditions would surely wreak havoc.