Just when you thought there wasn’t anything else toad could do J
Study suggests toads can detect coming earthquakes
AFP/DDP/File – A toad sitting on a road in Germany. For ages, mankind has
craved a tool that can provide early warning …
By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer
– 1 hr 12 mins ago
LONDON – Scientists may have a new ally in the struggle to predict deadly
earthquakes — bufo bufo, the common toad.
British researchers said Wednesday that they observed a mass exodus of toads
from a breeding site in Italy five days before a major tremor struck, suggesting
the amphibians may be able to sense environmental changes , imperceptible to
humans, that foretell a coming quake.
Researchers from the Open University were studying toads in central Italy when
they noticed a sharp decline in the number of animals at the site. Days later, a
6.3-magnitude earthquake hit, killing hundreds of people and badly damaging the
town of L’Aquila.
Researcher Rachel Grant said the findings suggested “that toads are able to
detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and
use these as a form of earthquake early warning system .”
Initially puzzled by the toads’ disappearance in the middle of the breeding
season, the scientists tracked the population in the days that followed. They
found that 96 percent of males — who vastly outnumber females at breeding
spots — abandoned the site, 46 miles (74 kilometers) from the quake’s
epicenter, five days before it struck on April 6, 2009.
The number of toads at the site fell to zero three days before the quake,
according to the study, published in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal
of Zoology .
“A day after the earthquake, they all started coming back,” said Grant, the
report’s lead author. “The numbers were still lower than normal and remained low
until after the last aftershock.”
She said one possibility is that the animals sensed a change in the amount of
radon gas emitted by the Earth because of the buildup of pressure prior to a
quake.
Scientists also have surmised that animals may be able to detect minor tremors
imperceptible to humans, or that they sense electrical signals emitted by rocks
under stress before an earthquake.
Grant said the sense may be the result of millions of years of evolution, a
trigger that tells the toads to move to safer ground.
“An earthquake could wipe out a population in that area,” she said. “A landslide
or flood could wipe out virtually 100 percent of the males, and quite a lot of
the females.”
Since ancient times, anecdotes and folklore have linked unusual animal behavior
to cataclysmic events like earthquakes, but hard evidence has been scarce.
Several countries have sought to use changes in nature — mostly animal
behavior — as an early warning sign , without much success.
The city of Tokyo spent years in the 1990s researching whether catfish behavior
could be used to predict earthquakes, but abandoned the study as inconclusive.
Roger Musson, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey , said the
problem studies like the Italian toad research lay in proving the connection
between the animal behavior and the quake.
“What happens is somebody observes some strange animal behavior then there is an
earthquake, so they link the two,” said Musson. “There are probably plenty of
cases in which there is strange animal behavior and no earthquake.”
He said the new study was “another bit of data in the large pile that has been
accumulating over the years. But it’s not in any shape or form a breakthrough.”
