Do Animals Really Anticipate Earthquakes? Sensors Hint They Do (scientificamerican.com) 41
An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American:
For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds... Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, both in Germany, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to precisely measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity...
The researchers used highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements — up to 48 each second — in any direction. During separate periods totaling about four months in 2016 and 2017, they attached these biologgers and GPS sensors to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy. A total of more than 18,000 tremors occurred during the study periods, with more seismic activity during the first one — when a magnitude 6.6 quake and its aftershocks struck the region. The team's work was published in July in Ethology...
Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of anticipatory behavior hours ahead of tremors. "It's sort of a system of mutual influence," Wikelski says. "Initially, the cows kind of freeze in place — until the dogs go crazy. And then the cows actually go even crazier. And then that amplifies the sheep's behavior, and so on...." This "swarm intelligence" can happen within or across species, Wikelski says. For example, "we did a study on Galápagos marine iguanas, and we know that they are actually listening in to mockingbirds' warnings about the Galápagos hawks," he adds. "These kinds of systems exist all over the place. We're just not really tuned in to them yet."
The researchers say the farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding, the authors contend, is consistent with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that diffuses outward.
The researchers used highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements — up to 48 each second — in any direction. During separate periods totaling about four months in 2016 and 2017, they attached these biologgers and GPS sensors to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy. A total of more than 18,000 tremors occurred during the study periods, with more seismic activity during the first one — when a magnitude 6.6 quake and its aftershocks struck the region. The team's work was published in July in Ethology...
Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of anticipatory behavior hours ahead of tremors. "It's sort of a system of mutual influence," Wikelski says. "Initially, the cows kind of freeze in place — until the dogs go crazy. And then the cows actually go even crazier. And then that amplifies the sheep's behavior, and so on...." This "swarm intelligence" can happen within or across species, Wikelski says. For example, "we did a study on Galápagos marine iguanas, and we know that they are actually listening in to mockingbirds' warnings about the Galápagos hawks," he adds. "These kinds of systems exist all over the place. We're just not really tuned in to them yet."
The researchers say the farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding, the authors contend, is consistent with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that diffuses outward.
