Can animals predict earthquakes?

Can animals really predict earthquakes?

The earliest record can be traced back to 373 BC. Many people saw rats, snakes and ferrets leaving the Greek city of Hlis before a big earthquake razed it to the ground. In the Tang Dynasty's "Kai Yuan Zhan Jing Di", there is also a record that "rats gather in the center of the imperial court and scream, and local slaughter cracks". After almost every major earthquake, survivors recall the signs before the earthquake, and it seems that there are reports of abnormal animal behavior-fish jumping, chickens not laying eggs, bees not returning to their nests, and all kinds of pets fidgeting ... Every year, there are more than 500,000 earthquakes that can be recorded by instruments in the world, more than 6,543,800 earthquakes that people can perceive, and more than 654.38+ 000 destructive earthquakes. From the Tangshan earthquake to the Sakamoto earthquake, to the 92/KLOC-0 earthquake in Taiwan Province Province, and to the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the trembling of the earth brought too much fear and trauma to people. However, so far, human beings have not found the law of earthquake occurrence, and accurate earthquake prediction is still the goal pursued by countless seismologists.

The theory is feasible and the operation is difficult.

If animals can help people, how good would it be? Indeed, the sensory system of many animals is much more sensitive than that of people. Vipers can sense infrared rays; Elephants and whales can sense infrasound waves; Dogs not only have a keen sense of smell, but also can hear ultrasonic waves. Many animals, especially cave animals, are very sensitive to vibration, so even if you crawl forward, rats can always easily feel your approach and run away. Many abnormal behaviors of animals before the earthquake were caused by this. Before many large earthquakes come, there will be many small foreshocks, and these frequent foreshocks may disturb those animals that are sensitive to vibration.

In particular, it should be pointed out that the17.3 earthquake that occurred in Haicheng, Liaoning Province on February 4, 1975 is the only successful prediction with scientific significance and social benefits in the world so far. This successful prediction is based on the monitoring of frequent foreshocks, rather than the widely spread reports of abnormal animal behavior.

So is it possible for animals to develop a set of special skills to avoid earthquakes? For an individual animal, including people, being injured by an earthquake in his life is a very small probability event. Especially those short-lived animals, such as mice, have almost no possibility of encountering a destructive earthquake in their life cycle. It is extremely wasteful to prepare a complex mechanism for an event with almost zero probability. Just as modern humans living in the electrical age occasionally encounter electric shock accidents, it is not necessary for people to live in heavy insulating clothes every day.

The behavior of animals is interfered by too many factors.

In 1970s, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initiated several studies on abnormal animal reactions and earthquakes, and the result was that "there was no credible connection between them". In fact, when the earthquake comes, the abnormal behavior of many animals is just a panic response to the vibration. Before many large earthquakes come, there will be many small foreshocks, and these frequent foreshocks may disturb those animals that are sensitive to vibration. In other words, many other events, such as weather changes, hunger, and even a truck passing by, will cause similar reactions of animals. Readers who have owned pets may have seen their pets lose their temper for no reason.

In recent years, scientific journals have also published two articles related to the prediction of large earthquakes by animal behavior: the article on the behavior changes of mice before and after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 published by Sichuan University in Bioelectromagnetics [1], and the report found that six of the eight mice in the experiment significantly reduced their exercise behavior three days before the Sichuan earthquake. Yes, indeed, it is not unusual for chickens to fly and dogs to jump.

In 20 10, researchers from the Open University of England published an article in the Journal of Zoology, pointing out that five days before the L 'Aquila earthquake in 2009, the male toad, 74 kilometers away from the epicenter, suddenly ran almost (96%) and stopped mating and laying eggs. In the face of such abnormal behavior, the researchers compared the records of various natural phenomena at that time, and found that neither the climate nor the moon phase could explain the abnormal behavior of toads, and only some monitoring data related to earthquakes, such as the changing trend of radon in the environment, were in good agreement.

The above research shows that animals may perceive physical and chemical signals related to earthquakes, and may also respond to them. But even if animals can really perceive earthquakes in advance, how can they "tell" people? That is to say, how do people find this signal from their behavior diagrams full of mixed noise?

There are many factors that affect animal behavior. In addition to their own physiological needs, the community and the environment also bring great pressure. When people interpret animal behavior, it is often impossible to judge its purpose or reason by its posture when it occurs. It is necessary to guess the far end, that is, evolution or near end, of a behavior from the aspects of physiology, energy and income through systematic observation and recording, which can be understood as individual mechanism. To study the abnormal behavior of animals, we must first confirm what is normal animal behavior. Then exclude external factors that have nothing to do with behavior change. Moreover, even if some factors are synchronized with behavior changes, they may not directly affect the behavior of animals, and it is up to experimental design to test whether this relationship exists.

The argument that animals' "abnormal" behavior can predict earthquakes is also reinforced by a common psychological phenomenon "psychological spotlight effect". When people encounter major events such as earthquakes, they can often recall more clearly what they experienced before the events-the so-called "abnormal" behaviors often occur, but most of them are forgotten.

Another common phenomenon is rumors. There is a common saying that after the Indian Ocean tsunami three years ago, almost no animal carcasses were found. However, Margot Homburg Park, a volunteer of the local stray dog foundation in Phuket, Thailand, said, "Many dogs were swallowed up by huge waves. I have nine dogs in the yard 500 meters from the sea. I didn't notice any unusual behavior. My husband felt the earthquake at 8 am, but the dog didn't respond. " When people face the tragic scene of corpses everywhere, will they still notice the corpse of a dog?

There is another fact that cannot be ignored. The losses caused by fake earthquakes are no less than those caused by real earthquakes.