Earthquakes and Animals

Chinese seismologists have underway a major program of evaluating animal behavior as a means of earthquake prediction. They got serious about the matter in 1966 when it was discovered that all the resident dogs left their kennels at a village in Hopei Province just before a large earthquake originated in the rocks below the town.

The Chinese scientists soon collected more than 2,000 eyewitness accounts of unusual pre-earthquake behavior, mostly involving domestic animals. The strange behavior was reported to peak in the 24-hour interval just prior to the earthquake; sometimes strange behavior in animals was observed several days before an earthquake. The bigger the earthquake, the more reports there were of unusual behavior.

Several centers now have been established in China to make earthquake predictions by various methods including observation of animals. These centers have set up operational networks to report and evaluate the observations of animal behavior.

An article by a Chinese scientist in the U. S. Geological Survey Earthquake Information Bulletin implies that the Chinese think that the strange pre-quake behavior of animals arises from their sensitivity to small foreshocks occurring before the main event. This idea comes partly from experiments on animals having had their sensory capabilities altered by surgery.

A series of observations near Yakutat just before the Lituya Bay earthquake on July 10, 1958, backs up the Chinese conjecture. One person picking berries saw leaves move when they shouldn't have, while nearby others saw birds become disturbed and fly over the trees in unusual numbers. Simultaneously yet another nearby group suddenly started getting bites from fish with every cast into the river. Several minutes later the magnitude 8 earthquake struck. In this instance it seems likely that the birds and fish were responding to vibrations evidenced by the moving leaves but which were not noticed by the people present. Also, it has been suggested that animals may be responding to the release of gases such as methane just before the earthquake.