Did animals sense the tsunami coming?

Panic resulted from last week’s tsunami warning.While we are all dependent on the Meteorology Department and the Disaster Management Centre to warn us about an impending tsunami, animals are said to be have acute senses that help recognize environmental changes. There are some very interesting accounts of how animals responded just before the tsunami waves hit in 2004.

According to the National Geographic website, and eyewitness reports, in 2004, elephants are said to have screamed and run to higher ground, dogs had refused to go outdoors, flamingos had abandoned their low-lying breeding areas and  animals at zoos rushed into their shelters and could not be enticed to come out. Some speculate that the animals have a ‘sixth sense’ that we do not posses, but wildlife experts believe that animals are endowed with more acute hearing and other senses that might enable them to hear or feel the earth’s vibration, tipping them off of  approaching disasters – long before humans realize what’s going to happen.

The concept of an animal’s ‘sixth sense’ was also raised as very few animals had died at the Yala National Park, which was also devastated by the tsunami wave. A number of human lives were lost, but most of the animals managed to escape. So it is clear that animals somehow sense impending disaster and could run inland to get themselves away from the disaster. Perhaps, their ability to run fast, and knowledge of the terrain too, helped in their escape.

Even other experts say that animals can sense changes in the environment. In an interview for National Geographic, Joyce Poole, an elephant expert conducting  research on acoustics, said the reports of Sri Lanka’s elephants fleeing to higher ground didn’t surprise her. She said that research on both acoustic and seismic communication indicates that elephants could easily pick up vibrations generated from the massive earthquake-tsunami, she said.

Elephants during earth tremors

Poole has also experienced this firsthand.  “I have been with elephants during two small tremors, and on both occasions the elephants ran in alarm several seconds before I felt the tremor,” she said at the interview.

One of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries is Japan, where devastation has taken countless lives and caused enormous damage to property. Researchers there have long studied animals in hopes of discovering what they hear or feel before the earth shakes. They hope that animals may be used as a prediction tool. Some U.S. seismologists, on the other hand, are skeptical. Though there have been documented cases of strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes, the United States Geological Survey, a government agency that provides scientific information about the earth, says a reproducible connection between a specific behaviour and the occurrence of a quake has never been made. “What we’re faced with is a lot of anecdotes,” said Andy Michael, a geophysicist at USGS. “Animals react to so many things -being hungry, defending their territories, mating, predators, it’s hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal.”

In the 1970s a few studies on animal prediction were done by the USGS, “But nothing concrete came out of it,” Michael said. Since that time the agency has made no further investigations into the theory.

Published on LakbimaNews on 22.04.2012