Can animals sense earthquakes?

26 Comments

1. Interesting

2. Thank you Dr. Hossenfelder.

3. Cute sheep.

4. My cat horked up a hairball in my bed a few minutes before the P wave hit from the Landers earthquake. I had just got up and cleaned up the mess when it hit. He ended up a street pizza before the Northridge quake so I couldn't make any further correlations.

5. One problem with earthquake reporting, as opposed to weather reporting, is that nowadays, weather predictions are fairly accurate in the short term and less so in the longer term, and yet that this combination can and does seem to allow people to take action, or not, to cope with impending changes, while earthquake reporting and predictions do not appear to have set out a similar form of various time scale predictions that is acceptable to people affected by these earthquakes.
   If the weather man/woman gets it wrong, and they were once notorious for the latter, then people seem to adapt and accept the limitations of the weather man/woman's craft and note that over many years their prediction methods have improved.
   Earthquake predicting does not enjoy the same understanding, or even the same amount of sarcastic humour and jokes that were once directed at weather predictors, so the question can be asked, why is this so.
   What is it about incorrect weather predictions, and the incorrectly predicted weather situations that still kill many people, that are acceptable and even seen as funny by some people, that is so different to incorrect earthquake predictions, where these incorrect predictions are never regarded as humorous and where the predictors can be and are vilified and shamed by those who have experienced the earthquakes.
   What is terrifying about killer earthquakes that is not so terrifying with killer weather situations, and why do we laugh about the inaccuracies of one set of predictors and vilify the inaccuracies of the other.

6. Hi from California. Earthquakes are very loud. I heard a loud knock directly below me seconds before a strong earthquake, and there may be earlier sounds that animals can hear. No one doubts that the elephants who broke free of their chains just before the Boxing Day Tsunami heard distant rumbling. We don’t need science to tell us that. What I want to know is how they know that something dangerous is coming and that the best response is to run to higher ground.

7. Is it possible to have interference patterns in gravitational waves much like a double slit experiment could emit a fractured pattern on a background. I wonder if these patterns may instigate odd tensions across planetary bodies .

8. Of course animals and insects sense a coming change in the weather and react to it. Anyone who doubts this is on a different wavelength to me.

9. you could get the most nervous dogs from the pound cheap and sell them as earthquake dogs

10. 💪

11. Really cool video, Dr. Sabine! I've always been interested in this subject, since I was told the story of my dad sleeping through a fairly significant earthquake in California many, many years ago. He was well known as a heavy sleeper, LOL – which I sadly inherited. One of the many things my soon-to-be ex-husband (not my choice, long painful story) has now listed as things that made me an awful wife, now, after 39½ years.

    Anyway, not getting into that ugly story. Just, thank you for being such a bright spot in my otherwise very dark world, Dr. Sabine. I appreciate it so much!

12. Hum … that will explain Witches having cats.

13. Lived in Jakarta 10 years. Three (two dachshunds, 1 corgie cross) dogs never woke up from Richtee 4.0-6.7(?). I got awful headaches though. Oh and the tsunamis off west Sumatra and explosions of Anak Krakatao, Merapi, Ruand, Sinabung, Semeru.
    We had a lot of stray cats and rats (due to imperfectly closed very deep trottoir canals to prevent floods, also trottoir are filled with snakes and lizards attracted to yummy fat rats and snakes (King cobras hunt snakes) and omnipresent gecko
    Dogs SNORED through everthing, nothing happened re cats or rats, no snakes appeared and not even geckos seemed bothered.

14. I have seen lights during an earth quake. It was the power lines swinging and arcing.

15. "A few seconds might just be enough to get out of the house"
    Please be aware that when an earthquake is happening or seconds from happening, the most important advice, at least here in Japan, is DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.
    Find shelter inside your house like under a table, away from windows or objects that might fall down.

16. I was thinking about the control group idea. Our German Shepherd never barked at our floor except once when we lived in San Jose, CA. In her entire life (whether in Germany or California or Texas) she barked at the house floor once. And that night we had a fairly large earthquake. And where she had barked? There was now a long crack in the floor. I am not sure how you can do a control group with animals other than comparing when they bark at the floor and compare to earthquakes or see if other dogs did not bark at their floor and a long crack did form. It was enough for me to think "hmmm, maybe something might be to the idea of animals being able, under at least certain circumstances, detect an earthquake."

17. Great thanks Sabine. Another subject I want to ask you to deal with. How about adopting HEPA filters widely as a long term COVID measure? I wish you would make a video on this matter.

18. When I was in Hawai'i, the animals sensed an earthquake before it happened. At night there are coqui frogs. They are pretty much all you can hear at night. Well, it went from hearing them as normal to going dead silent. Then a few seconds later there was an earthquake.

19. Is it a possible misalignment between Earth’a local, internal dynamics (gravity,‘ EM field), to the global, solar system dynamics. It could induce a local shock event. The belt burs timing indicates a a traveling wave event moving inward .

20. 7:56 See what you did there 😀

21. Humans are great at finding patterns. If they can't find a pattern, they'll find a pattern.

22. With full due respect I have for Sabine, I don't see why she should talk about subjects that are so far away from her field. It gives the impression as though she has a contract to produce a quota of clips every month and she is trying to follow the contract. I listen to her, because I assume every clip she has something she really feels to express her knowledge and opinion about, and naturally it should be in a field related to her domain. Language or biology and animal behavior is not a field I expect her to enlighten me.

23. Earthquake or not, Sabine Hossenfelder is sure to shake up the internet.

24. We can safely ignore the study which compared missing pet reports and earthquakes. That's just a ridiculous correlation to look for in the first place.

25. my grizzly bear starts to talk weird when the quaking comes

26. Luma Prieta is not in southern California. It's near silicon valley…

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