Can Animals Predict Earthquakes? Italian Farm Acts as a Lab to Find Out
A German scientist, Mr. Wikelski tagged several animals on a farm in Pieve Torina in the Marches region of central Italy in October to monitor their behavior, hoping
that if it changed in some consistent way before an earthquake, it could be used as an early warning system and potentially save thousands of lives.
The hope is that once the animal data is compared with the earthquake data from the area — using earthquakes
of a magnitude of 4 as a cutoff — it will show distinctive behavior before, during and after an earthquake.
Wikelski said that Even if we can show that this is something that is being sensed by these animals,
You could see their livelihood was gone," he said,
but the family was "still very nice." Mr. Wikelski tagged a number of animals on the farm — a rabbit, sheep, cows, turkeys, chickens and dogs — with small but sophisticated sensors.
Wikelski said that We are really excited because this is the first time we could tag animals before, during and after a major earthquake series,
Wikelski said that If it’s just one animal alone from one farm, we wouldn’t be able to see a signal,
but if you take it all together, the synergies, the synthesis of these sensing systems, that’s really what seems to give the signal,