Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?

Kirschvin’s study raises a crucial question: Can animals develop a genetic tendency to forecast earthquakes and maintain this precautionary behavior despite varying degrees of seismic activities? All animals’ natural instinct is to defend themselves from predators or escape the impending dangers they cannot thwart.

The existing genetic makeup allows a wide variety of vertebrates to flag “early warning” behaviors for other types of events, and it’s possible that some animals emulated that behavior and transformed it into a seismic-escape response.

The contradiction

However, the scientific community has not agreed over animals predicting earthquakes.

Whit Gibbons, professor of zoology and senior biologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, tells to The Gadsden Times that survivors should appreciate can thank scientists for monitoring seismic waves in the earth’s crust, “not the odd behavior of animals”.

But a review of 180 publications reporting 700 records of abnormal or unusual animal behaviors prior to 160 earthquakes points to a significant correlation between these behaviors.

Although seismologists and scientists have yet to find a coherent pattern in using animal behavior as one of the tools to forecast major quakes, more research into this phenomenon could yield the desired results.

Source: TRT World