Last week, challenged us to make webcomics explaining how a piece of scientific information has evolved over time. I decided to talk about animals "predicting earthquakes!" I'm pretty proud of how this turned out and it seemed appropriate to share here 😊
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Have they ever done experiments on dogs by simulating the ground tremors remotely to see how the dogs respond to vibrations below the threshold of what would alarm humans?
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Dogs don't seem to be bothered by a large truck in the distance going by -- but then again the waves may be very different. I wonder if there is some evolutionary mechanism at play that helped certain animals survive by detecting the initial vibrations of an earthquake.
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I’m no expert (never owned a dog) but the dog my brother in law owns on his farm goes crazy when a car comes in the distance - long before we see it. Very much animal dependent and on the environment (how quiet usually).
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I imagine even a weak seismic wave in a quiet room is quite a unique experience - it affects the whole room essentially simultaneously. The rumble of a truck is usually the combination of vibrations and sound where you can sense the direction it comes from.
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Yep! Also, wouldn't seismic waves generate infrasound that a dog might respond to but a human wouldn't hear? There could be multiple things happening simultaneously that triggers the dog's "oh shit" senses.
I probably shouldn't limit this to just dogs because I remember reading somewhere that right before the Indian Ocean earthquake of 2004 that a lot of animals were behaving oddly. Again, this is just hearsay and it is very easy for people to have poor memory of a traumatic event.
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Some of those reports from the 2004 earthquake are mentioned in the review paper I linked! There were a couple elephants with satellite collars: "...the data did not show any indication of a sixth sense or unusual behavior indicating an early detection of the approaching tsunami"
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