Animals feel earthquakes before they happen. Can they help us predict disaster?

When the earthquake struck central Italy on October 26, 2016, Martin Wickelski and his colleagues landed on the site in less than 24 hours. Wickelsky, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany, wanted an intuition test that had existed for thousands of years – foretelling animals by earthquakes. A nearby farm in the earthquake-struck area provided an ideal scene to test this theory.

Now, after sifting through months of behavioral data for farm animals and 18,000 earthquakes (most of them secondary) later, Wickelsky and his colleagues see a pattern. In a study published in Ethology, they reported evidence of animals interacting in a consistent manner before an impending earthquake.

The effects of aftershock

The study started shortly after the October earthquake. Wickelsky and his colleagues rushed to farmland in the affected area to mark farm animals, hoping to understand how animals interact with the aftershocks of the earthquake. They tagged a number of animals – six cows, five sheep, two dogs, two chickens, turkeys, and rabbits – with sensors that measure animal movement in 3D, such as Fitbit. Two days later, another major earthquake struck, giving Wickelski’s team a rare opportunity to observe animals before, during and after the earthquake.

After this initial episode, the researchers returned to the farm in January 2017, to tag the same animals again for an extended period until April 2017. “I think chicken and turkey were consumed in the holiday season,” according to Wickelsky.

The schedule of data on the behavior of cows, sheep and dogs was prepared from October 2016 and January – April 2017, the researchers compared the schedule of animal activity with the schedule of earthquakes that were occurring in the same period. We collaborated with Winfried Pohlmeier, an economist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and used standard economic models to compare the two data sets.

Animals in earthquakes

Their results show a consistent pattern of animal behavior that occurs before every earthquake. The animals expected eight out of nine earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 4.0 that occurred between January and April 2017. However, pre-emptive behavior was only seen when the animals were housed in a stable, not when they had the freedom to roam the pastures. “We don’t know the reason,” says Wickelski. The team also found that the farther the animals are from the earthquake’s epicenter, the longer their behavior will take to change, hinting at some of the slow-spreading signals that animals are discovering.

Moreover, the unusual behavioral pattern that preceded the earthquake was only important when the group behavior of the three species was taken into account. Barely changed individual behavior. Every animal senses its environment in a distinctive way “but if it collects [their] Sensing systems together, give you a new way to sense the environment, and in principle, this is the sixth sense of animals, “says Wickelsky.

Several studies in the past have reported anecdotal evidence of animals showing unusual behavior prior to the earthquake. The officers left their pools before the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. Herds of cows were reported to have landed on a hill before the Aquila quake itself. Camera traps showed wild animals behaving unusually before the 2011 Contamana earthquake in Peru. “But it’s always difficult to say if this really is [is] “Good data set,” says Wickelski. In this sense, the Wickelsky Study is the first of its kind, in which animals are systematically monitored for a long time and then these animal activity schedules, collected over months, are compared with seismic activity.

A new way to predict earthquakes?

However, not everyone is convinced of Wickelsky’s study. “It doesn’t change the rules of the game in terms of earthquake prediction, because it’s a very narrow study of their location,” says Stephen Hicks, an earthquake expert at the Royal College in London. “But it creates the potential for more detailed future studies.”

Rohini Balakrishnan, an environmental scientist at the Indian Institute of Science in India, is also cautious. She points to two things that stand out: “Small sample sizes – just a few individuals of each type – is a correlation,” she wrote in an email. “I think one needs to test more individuals.” In other words, the fact that seismic activity follows a collective change in animal behavior does not necessarily mean that one causes the other. There may be other variables that researchers do not know.

Wickelski identifies the disadvantages of his studies. “It is a chain of earthquakes, one farm, one region in the world, and this is the main constraint,” he says. “We need a lot of these measurements before we can say something.” He also acknowledges the suspicion his research line receives, but says, “In a way, this is good because then we have to show that there are real data and real patterns.”

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