When lightning strikes the sea, what happens to all the fish? Do they die?

Lightning is basically a bolt of high-powered electricity which prefers to travel along the path of least resistance, i.e. through a good conductor. Sea water, being salty, is a pretty good conduc-tor. Hence, one might infer that lightning hitting the sea would spread right through it, killing all the fish. In reality, that's not what happens, be-cause apart from the material's conductivity, the amount of material that the lightning encounters also influences its passage. The more stuff it has to go through, the more resistance there is to the electricity moving through it. There is millions of cubic meters of water where the lightning thunderbolt strikes So even though salt water is a good conductor, the electricity would not be able to pass through it all. Instead, it spreads across the surface of the water and soon dissipates.