Animals sensing earthquakesThese weren't the first times researchers suggested links between animal behavior and earthquakes. Indeed, there's a long history of anecdotal reports of pets, zoo animals and wildlife acting very strangely in the days or minutes before a tremor is felt by humans.
One famous instance is recorded in the history of Helike, an ancient Greek city. During the winter of 373 B.C., "all the mice and martens and snakes and centipedes and beetles and every other creature of that kind in the city left," wrote the Roman author Aelianus. "After these creatures had departed, an earthquake occurred in the night; the city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared."
In February 1975, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Haicheng, a city of 1 million people located in China's Liaoning province. But one day earlier, city officials ordered an evacuation based in part on reports of strange animal behavior: Hibernating snakes in the area, for example, abandoned their winter hideouts months before normal. The early evacuation of Haicheng is credited with saving thousands of human lives.
Zoo officials at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., reported that many of their animals sought shelter or made distress calls in the minutes before a 5.8-magnitude quake struck the region on the afternoon of Aug. 23, 2010. Nocturnal snakes like copperheads came out of hiding, apes moved into the treetops and flamingos huddled tightly moments before the temblor was felt by zookeepers.
Toads moving uphillAmong the first scientific studies to document animal behavior before an earthquake comes from Italy, where a team of scientists spent a month investigating the breeding behavior of common toads (Bufo bufo) in April 2009. The toads typically breed in a shallow pool on a lakebed.
But at one point, most of the site's toads suddenly disappeared — and five days later, a strong earthquake struck the region. The toads returned to the pool once the quake's last aftershocks occurred. The researchers published their findings in the Journal of Zoology.
"It's the first time that any study has really documented unusual behavior before an earthquake in a scientific and methodical way," lead study author Rachel Grant, a zoologist from The Open University in the U.K., told LiveScience in an earlier interview. "We did it properly and scientifically, and consistently looked at behavior."
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