Originally published at: Can animals reliably warn us of impending disasters? | Boing Boing
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My doggo regularly warns me of eating too many snacks without sharing, lucky for me.
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I’m incredibly skeptical of any phenomenon that claims to predict an earthquake so far in advance. My wife is a geophysicist who studies quakes, and the thing to know is that they’re a cascade kind of event where stress that’s built up over very long periods of time is suddenly released because some localized weak point miles underground fails and also just happens to be surrounded by enough other weak points that the failure spreads. The initial failure is no different between a huge quake and one that’s so small that it’s completely undetectable. It’s kinda like trying to predict an avalanche but on a mountain where the snow builds up over decades. The snowflake that ends up triggering it isn’t any different than the trillions of ones that came before it and doesn’t put out a special signal beforehand.
Even if animals could predict earthquakes what’s the theory about why they would evolve such an ability? Maybe for burrowing critters it would matter a little but for surface-dwelling animals that don’t live inside fragile masonry structures like humans an earthquake poses almost zero safety risk.
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Tree falls, rock falls, mud slides, sand liquifaction and tsunamis are a handful of dangers to animals in nature associated with earthquakes I can think of off the top of my head. 
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Other than tsunamis the number of human or animal lives lost to those factors are absolutely minuscule and seem unlikely to drive evolution. And the nice thing about tsunamis is that they usually don’t hit the land immediately. If you can feel/sense a big quake that happened far away you can usually have enough time to head for high land. The one in 2011 took 30 minutes after the quake to reach Japan. The Sumatra one in 2004 took about 2 hours to reach land.
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Honestly the “animals predict it” idea has been thoroughly checked and disproven multiple times over the decades. Including this angle of checking population movements. Last thing I saw was bird migration patterns.
It just never pans out. And there isn’t really a plausible way it would even work. People can sometimes squeak something like this out of the data, but it never amounts to something predictive. Nor does it tend to work out across longer spans of time, or larger groups of animals.
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That’s a understatement.
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Worth noting that although they correctly predicted 7 out of 8 mag +4.0 earthquakes, they also did not state (at least not in the BBC article) what the false positive rate was. Hard to use this as a predictive method if 3 out of 4 times the critters are running around just because they feel like it.
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Oh and it’s not just earthquakes either. Severe weather, flooding, disease outbreaks, war.
We’ve got that story about a thousand different subjects.
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Yes, that’s something my wife deals with a lot at her work. There are folks who love to come forward and get in the news when one of their vague predictions comes to pass but want to ignore all their past failed predictions. There’s this one guy who studies cloud patterns as his predictive phenomena who’s been pretty bad about this.
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Yes, my old roommates dog warned us by whining loudly, moments before a disaster happened all over our kitchen floor.
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Well, there’s two instances, we can write a book, tour the world, and then retire.
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“What’s that Lassie? The house market is overheated and the bubble will soon pop?”
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Coming from a Max Planck institute, one assumes this study isn’t total quackery, but still, yeah – extraordinary claims require extraordinary support, and there are a lot of potential pitfalls in a statistical exercise like this.
And the headline claim is pretty wild; seismometers can almost certainly detect far weaker signals than animals can, so if it is easier to detect earthquakes from animals’ noisy responses to those signals, the animals’ signal-processing techniques must be vastly better than anything humans have thought of. Which, maybe? But again, it’s an extraordinary claim.
If there have been 18.000 quakes in the region, then any “increased activity” is bound to have happened close to an earthquake by chance alone, so the analysis would have to be really meticulous. I mean. you could sit flipping a coin, and there’d usually be a quake within 24 hours of flipping heads, so that alone tells us nothing. If the geology is that sensitive, you might even want to examine whether stampeding animals themselves could affect seismic activity, before concluding that goats have borderline psychic powers.
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I doubt safety risk is the issue for animals. Personally, I find the ground shaking to be an unpleasant experience. If it happened to me more than once and there were some signs leading up to it that I could perceive, if I noticed them again I would move out of the area - hoping to avoid a repeat. 
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To be clear there’s no doubt that some animals perceive and react to the P-wave of a big quake, which (depending on your distance from the epicenter) can arrive several seconds before the high amplitude S-wave shaking. But that’s not really predicting a quake so much as reacting to the early signs that one has already occurred and is heading your way.
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Usually I’m very resistant to these kinds of borderline-supernatural notions, but animals predicting earthquakes… I want to believe in it so badly!
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Goats predict fun and frolics.
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“Max Planck Insitiute? How much more Planck could there be?”
“None. None more. This is Max Planck!”
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