Are animals more sensitive to tsunamis?

Are animals more sensitive to tsunamis?

Ian Sample, Guardian News Service, London

Could animals have sensed the looming waves? Among the countless tales of human tragedy, anecdotes of animals behaving weirdly before the tsunami struck have been creeping into the news.

In Thailand, elephants used to carry tourists around began wailing or broke free of their chains and made a break for higher ground, the news agency Reuters reported this week. Other reports have claimed that suspiciously few animals perished in the disaster.

According to Jeffrey Park, a seismologist at Yale University, the most likely explanation for behavioural changes is that some animals felt tremors from the earthquake that caused the tsunami. And the vibrations they sensed were enough to distress them. Far from the earthquake's epicentre, the vibrations may have been too slight for humans to feel.

Plenty of animals are atuned to vibrations in the ground. Rodents as well as elephants have been shown to use shockwaves as a means of communicating.

The suspicion that animals may have a sixth sense for anticipating earthquakes has been recorded countless times.

In the 1997 book Dangerous Earth: an introduction to geologic hazards, Brian Skinner, also at Yale, compiled a list of reports, which includes anecdotes of strange behaviour by all manner of creatures from snakes and turtles to chickens and eels, some claiming to be as early as three weeks before earthquakes, or up to 250km from the epicentre. But Skinner is dubious of many of the reports.

"I can't see a chicken sensing anything," he says. "The trouble is, we can't ask them."

Regardless of any scientific basis to back it up, Chinese authorities have long charged zookeepers and farmers to report any strange behaviour in their animals in the belief it might betray a future earthquake.

"Whether animals can really feel earthquakes is a hypothesis waiting to be tested," says Park.