Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour fitted animals with motion sensors to investigate whether they could be an early warning system for earthquakes.
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00:00Animals may have a sixth sense, and no, they don't see dead people, but it may help them
00:09sense when earthquakes will strike.
00:12An international research team placed sensors on six cows, five sheep and two dogs on a
00:17farm in Italy in an earthquake-prone area.
00:20They studied their movement over several months and found they were unusually restless up
00:24to 20 hours before earthquakes.
00:27Animals closer to the quake's epicenter started behaving unusually earlier than those that
00:32weren't.
00:33Though the team says it's still unclear how their sixth sense works, they have a few ideas.
00:38Researchers think they may be able to sense earthquakes by picking up the air's ionization
00:43caused by large rock pressures in earthquake zones with their fur.
00:47Or it's possible animals can smell gases released from quartz crystals before an earthquake.
00:52Today, predicting when and where earthquakes will happen is still a challenge.
00:56However, researchers say studying a big number of animals in different regions around the
01:00world could provide further clues.
01:02The study was published in the Ethology International Journal of Behavioral Biology.