People have always speculated about the abilities of animals to sense natural calamities much before their occurence; And there's nothing unnatural about these speculations, once we explore the various events when such a phenomenon occurred:
1) The earliest events that mention the eerie behavior of animals prior to catastrophe include that of the Greek historian Thucydides(373 bc), who mentions about the snakes, dogs, weasels and rats, deserting the city of Helice in unison days before an earthquake occurred there.
Also, the earthquake in Naples in the year 1805 had triggered the Oxen, sheep, dogs and geese to make strange alarming cries minutes before the ground shook.
image courtesy: CHOO Yoon-KONG/AFP via getty images
2) The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 killed atleast 2,25,000 people from a dozen of Asian and African countries, and a major reason for such a massive scale of destruction was attributed to the failure of warning signals, that could give no useful alert.
And yet, eyewitness accounts reveal that minutes and hours before the earthquake of magnitude
9.1 Mw( followed by the tsunami shortly after), local animals like that of cows, goats, cats, birds and even elephants exhibited a desperate attempt to flee from the coasts towards the inlands. For instance, in the coastal village of Bang Koey in Thailand, locals noted a herd of Buffalo near the coast suddenly pricking their ears and stampeding towards a nearby hill a few minutes prior to the surge of waves.
According to eyewitness accounts, elephants ran for higher ground ahead of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (Credit: CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN/Getty)
https://images.app.goo.gl/Vm7xR2jjgCGwFdccA
3) A similar behavior pattern of elephants was noted during the 2010 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami as well. The magnitude of this earthquake was noted to be 7.8 Mw on the Richter scale and it costed the lives of nearly 500 people on the Mentawai islands.
Till date, we do not possess any technology that can predict earthquakes or tsunamis with a high degree of accuracy, so as to take necessary evacuation steps.
That is precisely why a lot of scientists are paying a close attention to this animal prediction behaviour, that might serve the purpose.
Some research projects working on this phenomenon include:
1] French Biodiversity Office (OFB), which is scrutinizing how migratory birds crossing the Pacific are able to avoid storms.
2] The study by a team led by Martin Wikelski from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany (2016), doing biologging in a seismic hazard zone of Central Italy on cows, dogs and sheep.
Scientist Martin Wikelski tagged goats to see if they could detect volcanic eruptions at Mount Etna (Credit: Christian Ziegler/MPI-AB)
3] Study conducted by Wikelski in Sicily(2020) also showed an advanced sense of danger by the goats.
A highly acceptable hypothesis to explain this animal behaviour can be attributed to the strong electromagnetic pertubations that are detected by them.
Almost every earthquake is preceded by severe stressful conditions in the earth's crust– stresses known to create electronic charges called "positive holes". These positive holes rapidly flow from the crust to the troposphere where they cause ionisation of air molecules.They also give rise to ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves, which are detected by animals. What makes this theory even more plausible is the fact that animals also contain a lot of iron, which is sensitive to magnetism and electric fields.
To conclude, animals definitely provide an interesting scope of perspective on the pre-detection of disastrous natural events and if we dig deeper, we might unveil some fascinating capacities of animals not previously known to the mankind!
References:
Miller, N.(2022).The animals that detect disasters. Future Planet. BBC.
