There was the time hundreds of snakes came out of hibernation early before a devastating 7.3 magnitude earthquake in the Chinese city of Haicheng in 1975.
Then there were the golden-winged warblers that flew 700km from their breeding grounds in Tennessee, USA, ahead of a swarm of tornadoes in 2014, despite having just arrived from their 5,000km migration.
- A ‘demon cat’ that haunts the White House and a tsunami-predicting fish – animals associated with death
- Discover the weird 'doomsday' fish, the eerie sea serpent-like monster that, according to legend, can 'foresee' deadly tsunamis
Examples abound of animals appearing to predict natural disasters, with anecdotes dating back as far as Ancient Greece, when the historian Thucydides wrote of rats, weasels, snakes and dogs deserting the city of Helice before an earthquake in 373 BC.
With natural disasters hitting us by surprise, it’s appealing to entertain the notion of animals as crystal-ball gazers. Even today, while meteorological forecasting can give advance notice of weather-related events like hurricanes and flooding, the science of seismology is not yet able to accurately predict earthquakes.
Tsunamis, on the other hand, which follow seismic activity in our oceans, can often be predicted – yet remote, vulnerable communities often lack the infrastructure required for effective warning systems.
Can animals predict natural disasters?
But while it makes sense that we should grasp for clues that might help us avert the impacts of natural disasters, the science behind animal forecasting is pretty shaky.
Not only is there insufficient long-term baseline data on ‘normal’ animal behaviour with which to compare the unusual behaviour, but reports of this behaviour tend to be gathered retrospectively, rather than at the time of the incident itself.
Confirmation bias – our very human tendency to interpret information in a way that fits with our pre-existing beliefs – has a big role to play here. The fact that conditions are impossible to replicate with any precision, thanks to the very nature of these disaster events, is also problematic.
What we deem ‘unusual’ when it comes to animals’ movements, calls, feeding or hibernation habits is highly subjective and based on our still limited understanding of most species’ sensory sensitivities and behavioural responses.
Some scientists have suggested that in the lead-up to natural disasters, animals might be responding to tiny fluctuations in air pressure, say, or magnetism that precede a disaster event. These theories are intriguing and therefore possibly worth exploring.
It’s certainly the case that many animals are naturally more sensitive to environmental factors, including seismic activity, than we are, but so far no one has found any good evidence that we could use this sensitivity as a tool of prediction.
On the contrary, in a 2018 review of 180 academic papers relating to unusual animal behaviour before earthquakes, scientists at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany found a strong correlation between this behaviour and the typical pattern of so-called ‘foreshocks’ before earthquakes, hypothesising that the animals observed were reacting in the aftermath of these smaller tremors – rather than in anticipation of the main earthquake event.
Despite the significant challenges associated with the science of disaster prediction by animal behaviour, rigorous work is ongoing, notably by a team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany that previously ran some intriguing studies on the responses of cows, sheep, dogs and goats to seismic activity in Italy.
The institute’s ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) project involves attaching transmitters to a range of species.
Data from the transmitters will be published in a public online database that scientists hope will facilitate greater understanding of how animals could help to predict disasters.
The stakes certainly couldn’t be higher.
