Can goats predict earthquakes? Can dogs predict volcanic eruptions? These scientists believe it | Animal behavior

Scientists enlist some unusual recruits in their efforts to predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural phenomena. They are enrolling thousands of dogs, goats and other farm animals – as well as a variety of wild animals – in studies designed to monitor their movements from space.

The program uses tiny transmitters attached to mammals, birds and insects. The detailed movements of these creatures will then be monitored by a special satellite due to be launched next year.

The aim is not only to study how they react to threatening natural events such as volcanic eruptions, but also to gain new insights into migration, the spread of diseases in animals and the effects of the climate crisis, say researchers.

“Ultimately, we hope to launch a fleet of about six satellites and build a global observation network that will not only provide details on wildlife movements and animal health around the world, but also show how living things respond to natural phenomena such as earthquakes,” said the project leader, Martin Wikelski, from the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology in Germany.

The value of studying tagged animals in this latter area had already been demonstrated in early experiments in Sicily on the slopes of Mount Etna, Wikelski said last week. “We found that goat behavior is pretty good at predicting large volcanic eruptions.”

Sensors have shown that animals become nervous before an outbreak and refuse to go to higher pastures that they would normally like to visit. “You know in advance what’s coming. We don’t know how they do it, but they do it,” Wikelski said.

Similarly, researchers monitored dogs, sheep and other livestock in Abruzzo, outside Rome, and found that they, too, responded in ways that predicted seven of eight major earthquakes in the region in the past 12 years.

Stories about animals behaving strangely before earthquakes or eruptions are not new. The Greek historian Thucydides claimed that rats, dogs, snakes and weasels invaded the city of Helice shortly before an earthquake in 373 BC. Left.

Similarly, the 1975 Haicheng earthquake in China occurred after snakes and rats were observed leaving their burrows.

Why these animals behaved this way is less clear. “In the run-up to an earthquake, tectonic plates slide over one another under enormous pressure, causing ions from the rock to be thrown into the air. The animals may respond to that,” said Wikelski, founder of the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (Icarus), an international collaboration involving teams of scientists around the world.

Icarus was made possible by a revolution in tagging technology. Tiny digital transmitters – with small lithium batteries – and cheap and abundant tiny GPS devices have made it possible to produce tags that weigh just a few grams.

“We’re going from a point where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to a reversal,” Michigan University ecologist Scott Yanco told MIT Technology Review. “We are now able to track most things.”

Understanding how living things respond to geological changes is just one area of ​​interest in this revolution, Wikelski added. “For example, we can monitor the health of wildlife from space,” he said.

One example is electronic ear tags – equipped with tiny 30g accelerometers – that have been placed on wild boars. From changes in an animal’s movements, it is clear that if a boar contracts African swine fever – a highly contagious virus – it spreads easily between wild boars and domestic pigs.

Knowing when a disease is breaking out in the wild could be important for limiting the disease’s impact on farms, researchers say. “This is a turning point for wildlife disease surveillance,” said Kevin Morelle, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute.

The technology is also intended to help scientists understand the processes that drive migrations. Creatures as small as squirrel moths have been equipped with transmitters, and their movements could soon reveal the secrets behind the 2,000-mile migrations they make between Europe and Africa each year.

“Similarly, we will be able to study animal populations to determine how they respond to habitat changes caused by global warming,” Wikelski said.

Icarus was originally expected to become fully operational several years ago, when the team began working with Russian scientists to deploy a radio telescope on the International Space Station to monitor tagged animals. “After the invasion of Ukraine, we decided to end this cooperation,” said Wikelski.

As a replacement, the team has built a small satellite called Icarus CubeSat, which is scheduled to launch next year. “After that, we will expand our operations until we have about six CubeSats and a permanent system to monitor animals as they move and migrate around the world,” Wikelski said. “This should give us a huge amount of data about animal behavior.”