Story from AFP via Breitbart, h/t to Leif Svalgaard. Maybe the Chinese had it right way back then with this gadget:
For ages, mankind has craved a tool that can provide early warning of that terrifying moment when the earth begins to shake.
But if a scientific paper published on Wednesday is confirmed, we may at last have found one.
The best hope yet of an earthquake predictor could lie in a small, brown, knobbly amphibian, it suggests.
The male common toad (Bufo bufo) gave five days’ warning of the earthquake that ravaged the town of L’Aquila in central Italy on April 6, 2009, killing more than 300 people and displacing 40,000 others, the study says.
Biologist Rachel Grant of Britain’s Open University embarked on a toad-monitoring project at San Ruffino lake, 74 kilometres (46 miles) north of L’Aquila, 10 days before the 6.3-magnitude quake struck.
Her two-person team observed the site for 29 days, counting toad numbers and measuring temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall and other conditions.
By March 28, more than 90 male toads had mustered for the spawning season, but two days later, their numbers suddenly fell, Grant reports.
By April 1 — five days before the quake — 96 percent of the males had fled.
Several dozen ventured back on April 9 for the full moon, a known courtship period for toads, although the tally was some 50-80 percent fewer than in previous years.
After this small peak, the numbers fell once more, only picking up significantly on April 15, two days after the last major aftershock, defined as 4.5 magnitude or higher.
In addition, the number of paired toads at the breeding site also dropped to zero three days before the quake. And no fresh spawn was found at the site from April 6 until the last big after-tremor.
Grant says the toads’ comportment is a “dramatic change” for the species.
Once male toads hole up at a breeding site, they usually never leave until the annual spawning season is over, she notes.
Eager to answer the riddle, Grant obtained Russian measurements of electrical activity in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer in the atmosphere, which were picked up by very low frequency (VLF) radio receivers.
The toads’ two periods of exodus both coincided with bursts of VLF disruption.
Read the entire article at Breitbart
This is a gadget which could be must for the Weather Shop
NASA has authorized a group of US scientists and teachers to participate in research and support an educational element of NASA’s VLF radio experiments. This authorized group created “Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionospheric Radio Experiments”, or “The INSPIRE Project”. The INSPIRE Project uses a hand held radio receiver which is relatively easy to put together as an electronics kit for middle and high school students. The INSPIRE receiver has been designed to receive radio waves in the VLF frequency range (1-10 kilohertz). Over 1400 INSPIRE receiver kits have been distributed to students across the United States over the last seven years. The INSPIRE radio receivers can easily make exciting natural and manmade VLF observations.
REPLY: I’ll have a look, Anthony
The following public announcement could save your life:
In the event of an outbreak of toad celibacy, sit down immediately, put your head between your knees and kiss your fanny goodbye. Remember:
“WHEN THE TOADS STOP HUMPING, THE EARTHS STARTS BUMPING”
REPLY: Bravo, best pun line I’ve seen in awhile – Anthony
Many Chinese for a long time believe that activity of toads and any other kind of animals and birds are useful to predict quakes. It has been advocated before and after the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake.
Toad activity in spring 2008 was claimed to be one of the precursors of the Wenchuan Earthquake on May 12, by a lot of Chinese AFTER the earthquake, and they blamed the scientists and officials for not predicting the quake for them (For some non-scientific reasons the Chinese government still keeps the hopeless earthquake prediction as one of their function). Among other rumors, many Chinese, even some “seismic researchers” believe that the Wenchuan Earthquake, which killed over 200, 000 people, was predictable. It took some scientists painfully to explain the statistics of precursor and earthquake.
Among the debating, it is very funny that some people claimed that the instrument invented by Zhang Heng (Chang Heng) used toads to get the ball from the dragen, which indicated the ancestors 2000 years ago knew the significance of toad precursor. Actually that instrument can only “record” rather than “predict” a quake.
I am sure this news will be translated to Chinese and will bring about new uproar. Sad to see such kind of paper got published.
As for the relation between toad activity and earthquake, USGS has the explanation:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php
There is also a lot of folklore about animals knowing when a hard winter is coming. My favorite is “The Long Winter” by Laura Ingalls Wilder where Pa sees numerous animal warnings that the coming winter will be worse than anything he’d ever seen — thick rodent dens, birds migrating early and further. I’d love to know what there is to it and how the mechanism works if it’s true. Supposedly the foxes around here were fluffier than usual and we had more snow and cold than any of the last several winters.
Janice (11:18:24)
Interesting post and great points made. TY 🙂
Speaking of… did anyone ever determine how birds are able to navigate during migrations?
Some years ago in discussing with my daughter (a geophysicist) eye witness (ear witness?) events reported as having occurred before earthquakes, I remember mention of some hearing a high pitched thin sound prior to quakes and that dogs and other were reported to go beserk some time before the quake struck.
The thought occurred to me that before the quake, there is a build up of shear forces in the ground and in sedimentary rocks, granites etc quartz, a piezoelectric mineral, is abundant. The build up in stress would (in this scenario) result in a build up of electric charge and that discharge of this would emit radio waves. I speculated that a house, other building,etc may act as a radio receiver. Since the only thing quicker than a sound wave through the ground would be electromagnetic, this seemed a plausible explantation if the eye witnesses were correct. I mentioned it to others over the years and I suggested possible instrumentation that could detect this piezoelectric build up near fault zones if it in fact occurred. So far everyone seemed to think I was a nutcase, I guess. This VLF stuff in the ionosphere seems even more way out so, now I don’t feel so bad.
I’d be more impressed if there were a history of frogs (or any given animal behavior) that CONSISTENTLY preceded an earthquake by a set amount of time. E.g., do the frogs always disappear five days before an earthquake? Do they ever disappear and an earthquake doesn’t come?
Hydrophones, seriously. Water transmits sounds quite differently, and the sound of rock on rock is deeply bass scale and beyond.
Couple of million and I’ll be all set to make some seriously heavy rock & roll.
Junk science. But a very convenient justification to employ toad researchers, and more of them – provided by, who else, toad researchers. Can see a whole worldwide toad-monitoring industry, presumably run by the UN.
The North American versions of these toads are only briefly at the mating/spawning ponds. Thus it is normal that they would all leave. Did I miss it or was there some comparison between their normal time there and this year?
I’m guessing… or should I say predicting… that this is nothing but a coincidence. The most obvious reason for that was stated by jorgekafkazar (10:04:41) who said:
“I see no obvious evolutionary advantage for a toad of being able to predict earthquakes.”
In fact, it would be SAFER for the toads to stay in the water during an earthquake. Thus the survival advantage would be to stay there.
With all these freelance ‘scientists’ competing for funding, turning their chosen subjects, and thus their employment, into something vital or otherwise more important is the trend these days, and this has been getting worse.
Supply and demand. The supply of ‘Conservation Biologists’ being pumped out of the ‘save the world’ faculties now greatly exceeds the actual need for them so they work very hard to maximize all threats and/or the alleged value of their work.
Oh dear.
Greece is an earthquake prone country. In 1980 we had an earthquage 80 km from Athens, ( actually the epicenter was where I have my vacation cottage) . It was a 6.2 followed by a 5.9 on the Richter scale and for about a month the whole region was shaking as if we were on a tree and somebody was shaking it.
Everybody in science became a seismologist. A solid state physicist started studying the so called “telurian currents” that appear accompanying the earthquakes and with quite primitive statistics and primitive triangulations came up with “predictions” of the type : within ten days there will be a quake covering about a third of Greece.
It was the classic case of science for the hoi polloi going rabid. Classical seismologists went wild against this, but the fellow had political cover and so kept on with the research and there exists a “school” that publishes such predictions in the archive system ( so as not to be accused of back fitting by the time a publication comes out) . Their statistics and triangulations have improved , but in a country where there are small quakes continuously and a 4 Richter once a month and a 5 every few months, when you give the prediction as 5+/-2 and two degrees by two in latitude longitude you can see that correlation and causation are mixed up.
We had a quake closer to Athens in 1999, of course it was not predicted .
The most recent prediction was for a quake of 5+/-1, +/- 1week, in a region north of Euboia a month ago. It did not happen.
Yes, there are currents, and other precursor signals, but they cannot really be used with any consistency to warn a population and the only thing that happens is newspapers grab the headlines and people panic . ( does this remind you of anything?).
On topic, one should order quakes during the mating season of these toads, I guess,
BTW the chinese use obervations of the fauna for predicting quakes:
http://rotstan.com/blog2/2006/12/28/snakes-and-quakes/
I can’t believe anyone is taking this seriously. Do the toads know where the epicentre is going to be and then hop a few hundred miles to safety? Why did only the males go? Why did they come back when the coast was clear?
Good grief.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6215991.stm
Experts at the earthquake bureau in Nanning, in southern Guangxi province, monitor local snake farms via 24-hour internet video links.
Scientists said the serpents can sense a quake from 120km (75 miles) away, up to five days before it happens.
They respond erratically, even smashing into walls to escape, scientists said.
“Of all the creatures on the Earth, snakes are perhaps the most sensitive to earthquakes,” Jiang Weisong, director of the earthquake bureau in Nanning, told The China Daily.
The reptiles respond by behaving extremely erratically, he said.
For folks wondering why this might have evolutionary advantage, consider that quakes often cause debris falls into low spots, like ponds. Further, toxic gases can be increased in wells (and one presumes ponds).
So you are about to commit your entire life worth of offspring to a pond. Maybe not so advantageous to do it just before it fills with mud, rocks, and toxic soup. Better to wait a few days and check it out then.
Where to go? Perhaps “up slope” away from from where stuff ends up in a crushing heap and where heavy toxic gasses accumulate… (Don’t forget the buffalo kills in Yosemite from toxic gasses and the “CO2 flood” from the African lakes). There have been plenty of driving forces over the millions of years of evolution to have put in place a “Run for the hills” response to “something feels icky”. (Ever wonder why the phrase isn’t “Run for the lake”? or “Run for the Valley”?…. )
FWIW one family member is a very reliable barometer and can predict storms about 2 days in advance with nearly 100% accuracy. (barometric headaches are well attested) And people have been shown to have a tiny bit of magnetite in the brain, just like other animals that sense magnetic fields, so it’s not at all beyond the pale that a critter might sense changes in the magnetic fields around them. Birds navigate by it, so it had a precursor at some earlier (amphibian?) stage of evolution common to birds and mammals too.
Just because we’re “tone deaf” to it doesn’t mean other are. Elephants can hear infrasound and use it to communicate over long distances beyond sight. A great quake would emit a vast amount of infrasound… If I heard a cannon shot in the infrasound I’d leave the beach too. So while “what they sense” is a bit unknown; I’d not write off “That they sense something” be it infrasound, gas chemical smells, or even mag field fluxes.
FWIW I can sense infrasound when loud enough. It gives me a wobbly slightly disoriented and eventually headachy feeling. Because of this there are some cars and vans that I find uncomfortable to ride in for long drives. At first I didn’t know what it was, then figured out that when I got that “wobbly feeling in my head” it went away when all the other noises stopped and eventually figured out it was loud vibrations I couldn’t hear, but were shaking my vestibular canals. [ plugging ears and doing things to dampen low frequencies helped. part of the clue… and feeling vibrating panels with the finger tips was partial confirmation as well. no low vibrations, no problem.] While I don’t react enough to ‘sense a quake coming’ I could easily see other critters doing so.
I do get the “wobbly feeling” during small quakes that don’t quite show up as shakers. Several times I’ve hit the USGS site to find a quake happened after the ‘wobbly’. I get nothing for a 1 or most 2s. I get a bit of “wobbly” between very high 2.x and 4. I feel the shaking for nearby 4s most of the time. It’s that “below 4 above 2.5” more or less where I’ll “wobbly” but not feel any shake and check the USGS. But it’s subtile. Took me a long time to make the connection. Over 5 I’m just too focused on enjoying the ride to notice anything else 😉 but I’m spoilt now. After a 7.2 the 5.x are just no fun anymore. 6 or better is all that gives a thrill these days. Maybe I ought to go visit Chile…
Electromagnetic Phenomena Related to Earthquakes and Volcanoes
http://www.agu.org/meetings/sm07/sm07-sessions/sm07_GP41D.html
Investigation of ULF magnetic pulsations, air conductivity changes, and infra red signatures associated with the 30 October Alum Rock M5.4 earthquake
http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/9/585/2009/nhess-9-585-2009.html
As much as some funions think it’s a joke, it’s deadly serious for anyone living with the constant threat of earthquakes as the most recent in Haiti and Chile have demonstrated. Those of us living with earthquakes want all the warning signs we can get for the big destructive ones. If certain critters are sensitive to changes in their electromagnetic environment and those same changes in EM fields can be monitored scientifically then we ought to pay attention to both and use all the tools available to predict and prepare. Reports of anomalous animal behavior could be used at times to alert monitoring systems to focus instruments on the area to determine if there is a real threat and act accordingly, possibly resulting in more time to protect life and property.
Gary P (10:16:50) :
> And the chorus sings, “Correlation is not causation”
> Here is a nice map of earthquakes for the last 7 days.
> http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/
> So where was the toad warning for these?
Depends, were those:
1) in areas where toad breeding season was happening?
2) in areas where toad behavior was being studied?
The whole animal precursor stuff is fascinating but annoyingly anecdotal. There are enough hints of precursors that should lead to a huge number of things that could be studied. Why do people seem to miss them? One thought I came up with is an electrical potential in the ground. Four legged animals cover more distance than us two legged folk and should feel a stronger voltage than we do. Plus they tend not to wear shoes (or wear conductive iron horseshoes) and hence have much better electrical connection to the ground.
Someone has got to be studying that, VLF radio emissions, etc. but I’ve heard very little in the way of results or non-results, which are important too. Personally I’d focus on ground issues and look for piezoelectric activity and subsonic audio. RF stuff is a derivitive effect.
Ah, toads.
When I was growing up in Ohio, I liked to treat the start of toad breeding season as the start of “real” spring. They’d generally show up on the day with the first warm night and tromp down to our pond and the males would start their wonderful trilling call. (This is the American Toad, Bufo americanus. From what I’m finding, the breeding season sounds very similar, but the breeding call very different.) I’d sleep with the bedroom window open, one that angled out so I could aim it to reflect pond sounds better.
I never saw a season that was interrupted as described above. Something might happen if there was a sub-freezing cold snap, but the season generally started after that was likely.
Our pond was one acre, my brother and I would bring the row boat for the season, generally I’d row around, and my brother would catch the all the toads we could find. One year we caught 45 males and 5 females. Once we let them all loose in the same spot, but the egg masses were such a mess that spread them more evenly around the pond in later years.
My very favorite amphibian. Spring peepers are okay, bull frogs are impressive, Wood frogs in New England are interesting, but their season is too short and their clacking grunts just can’t match a good toad trill.
anna v (12:38:46) :
Yes, there are currents, and other precursor signals, but they cannot really be used with any consistency to warn a population
Not necessarily to warn but to do prevention and preparedness work .The recent Chilean earthquake where many died after a tsunami was forecasted years before in the following paper
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29247367/Ruegg-et-al-2009-1-1
NickB. (12:28:01) : Speaking of… did anyone ever determine how birds are able to navigate during migrations?
IIRC, it’s a combination of magnetic compass (via that magnetite grain in the brain), visual clues (ground terrain recognition), and light polarization clues. Someone fitted homing pigeons with contact lenses and Helmholtz coils to play with their inputs. Pigeons can swap from one system to another, so you need to blank out most / all of them to get the bird disoriented. Don’t remember when / where I read it… magazine? SciAm? Had a picture of a pigeon with wire coils on it’s head to homogenize the mag field… Also, IIRC, the ‘polarization’ was the big surprise. Took them a while to figure out that they needed to play with polarizing as people don’t see it (they had already expected the magnetic sense). But birds do. (That is also believed to be part of why they fly into windows. They don’t see the window as ‘being there’ due to the polarizing effect of the glass.) I have a vague remembrance of someone studying birds and solar / lunar navigation, but don’t remember if they concluded birds navigate by starts / moon or not. I think they did? in a general N/S sort of way. Hard to distinguish from terrain mapping for N/S…
Gary Pearse (12:28:42) : Some years ago in discussing with my daughter (a geophysicist) eye witness (ear witness?) events reported as having occurred before earthquakes, I remember mention of some hearing a high pitched thin sound prior to quakes and that dogs and other were reported to go beserk some time before the quake struck.
The thought occurred to me that before the quake, there is a build up of shear forces in the ground and in sedimentary rocks, granites etc quartz, a piezoelectric mineral, is abundant. The build up in stress would (in this scenario) result in a build
Had a dog get exited before some quakes. Hard to distinguish from the dog getting exited about dinner, or before a cat… so we ignored it. Then the quake happened. Post diction? Donno…. but too hard to disambiguate for our dog from “happy to see you” or “unhappy to smell cat in yard” and from “need time alone in ‘smallest corner of yard’ NOW.”
The rocks as piezotransducer thesis has had some traction. I think it’s almost certainly an effect that will be present. Just don’t see how to sense it in a way that can be interpreted as “quake soon” vs “quake in 20 years”. I’d expect detecting the infrasound of the fore-shocks to be easier. But who knows. Set up all the sensors then re-run the tapes after a dozen quakes.
But that large quakes “do a lot of stuff” and that much of the “stuff” has precursor effects (like fore-shocks and piezoelectric-strain) is not in doubt. Just that learning how to listen to the data is the big issue… and for things with “brittle failure” you may not get a reliable ‘read’ from the data until just before the break happens… or just after 8-{
E.M.Smith (13:38:38) : Then, if earthquake lights, as the ones I have seen, are evidently the outcome of an electrical/plasma phenomenon, as its end discharge, then what if the earthquake is disrupted by a field change as in a lightning, not from below but from above?
Yarmy (12:40:43) :
> Do the toads know where the epicentre is going to be and then hop a few hundred miles to safety?
That would seem unlikely. I don’t know what a toad’s range is, but I think a group of Wood frogs in Plymouth NH may have frozen to death one year. I heard Wood frogs a few years later down the hill, so it would appear Wood frogs have a realtively small range. Toads probably range further since they are better adapted for dry land. Given the outcome, I’d say the toads were safe where they were.
My _guess_ is that animals have a sense that “something is different/uncomfortable here, must find better place.”
> Why did only the males go?
It isn’t clear that was the case. They may have only been counting males:
1) There are more of them.
2) Females may leave after breeding.
3) Only males make the breeding call, useful in finding them or getting a general sense of how many are out.
> Why did they come back when the coast was clear?
Umm, basic biology – all successful plants and animals are successful at procreation and many animals are will to take extreme chances for doing so. When the toads left is the far more interesting question. I found a toad with severe eye infections that had managed to make it to the pond. Instead of hiding from me, he readily clasped my fingers as though they were a female. Yes, toads have strong urges when the season is right.
BTW, a lot of successful animals have a strong urge to eat when their fuel reserves are low. Funny how that works.
> Good grief.
Oh good grief yourself. This wasn’t a behavioral study of breeding toads and earthquakes, it was a study of breeding toads that was disrupted by an unanticipated earthquake. What do you expect the researchers to do? They could discard the data for the year because the earthquake brought such contamination. They could document what they measured and that could be used by other researchers in subsequent studies, some which might look for animal behavior before earthquakes.
Had the researchers know that toads sense something related to earthquakes and that an earthquake was going to happen during breeding season, the study would have been very differently designed.
Nothing in the story makes excessive claims, predictions, or anything of the sort that we hear from AGW alarmists. I find it quite refreshing.
It’s clear you neither understand nor appreciate toads. A pity. 🙂
E.M.Smith (13:38:38) :
One aspect birds use that people usually don’t is the dip of the magnetic field. It’s parallel to Earth at the magnetic equator, perpendicular at the pols, and in between everywhere else. So it’s useful as a latitude sensor. (Combined with solar & season, it could also be used to derive longitude, but I doubt that has been studied.
When terrain is ocean, stars can be very useful! Ditto during magnetic field flips (ornithologists will have a field “day” when that happens!)
Indigo Buntings have been studied and found to learn the star positions while in the nest. Worth reading: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_10_99.html
E.M.Smith (13:03:15) wrote “For folks wondering why this might have evolutionary advantage, consider that quakes often cause debris falls into low spots, like ponds. Further, toxic gases can be increased in wells (and one presumes ponds).
So you are about to commit your entire life worth of offspring to a pond. Maybe not so advantageous to do it just before it fills with mud, rocks, and toxic soup. Better to wait a few days and check it out then.”
Sorry EM but this doesn’t really make sense. Only the male toads left. The females and all the eggs were still there. And that would not represent their “entire life worth of offspring” in any case – just one year’s worth.
Moreover, the idea of this pond being filled with debris would only make sense if it has steep adjacent terrain that could fall into it- which toad spawning ponds rarely (if ever?) actually do.
On the other hand, that Chinese snake story does make more sense because they could theoretically be escaping from crevices or whatever in the ground where they would be more vulnerable to earth movements and would also be able to feel anything far better than toads in water.
This toad story seems to be a very obvious case of someone trying to turn a coincidence into a cause-effect. The spawning season was complete – note that no more eggs were left after the quake – so the males left. Such is the way with toads. They don’t cuddle or even call the next morning.
P.S. Had the quake happened during their mating period, lots of great jokes to be made about how the earth moved for them.
P.S. “buffalo kills in Yosemite”?
“”” Enneagram (11:18:49) :
Many of the here so clever and light comentators would be more seriously interested in digging with an open mind the issue and not just rejecting this toads’ tale whether they were living near the “pacific ring of fire”. “””
Don’t confuse a bit of light hearted levity, with a failure to read and get the message.
Most of us are aware that many animal species are a lot more sensible than humans when it comes to reacting to warnings of some coming severe event.
Such as when the Indonesian Tsunami hit Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and whent eh tide suddenly rushed way out, the natives all ran out onto the empty mud; evidently thinking Moses had parted the sea for them; while the domestic cattle all headed for the higher ground; along with the wild animals.
So we get the idea; and we also have a sense of humor.
Enneagram (13:50:12) :
My guess is that in an earthquake, the energy related to ripping rocks apart is so much greater than a related electrical discharge that something like a thunderstorm above the fault will have an unmeasurable effect.
We need to get the word to Obama quick so he can hire 100,000 toad watchers. Good for jobs! Good for the economy! Yes we can!!!
Ric Werme – I for one appreciate toads very much. We have two ponds on our property where Bufo borealis breed and I monitor their numbers and the annual toadlet production, and have for 14 years. Not as intensively as these toad specialists but close enough.
In good years the ‘march of the toadlets’ up from this ponds is quite amazing. Can barely walk anywhere without stepping on some.