FOXSYLVANIA

– – Anecdotal accounts have existed for thousands of years of animals foreseeing natural disasters such as earthquakes; birds, dogs, snakes, cows, and other creatures have been attributed with such abilities, while documentation could not be reliably made.

A pair of behavioral biologists, Rachel Grant and Tim Halliday, have recently documented proof in the current issue of the Journal of Zoology that large numbers of toads fled a breeding area five days before a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy in April of 2009. With weather variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and rainfall normal,  it is speculated that the toads may have picked up on environmental signals prior to the earthquake such as foreshocks or changes in naturally occurring magnetic fields that encouraged them to flee.

Scientists who are already studying amphibians in earthquake-prone areas such as Indonesia are being looked to in order to determine if the behavior occurs again...listen to the animals, humans, or ignore them at your peril!

This entry was posted on March 31, 2010 at 11:14 pm and is filed under animal occurrences, animal oddities, animals, science, unexplained. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: animals predicting disasters