Apparently, all the animals in Sri Lanka’s big wildlife reserve fled to higher ground before the tsunami hit. As a result they haven’t found a single dead animal. This is despite the fact that the wave washed right through the park and they found plenty of dead humans.
How could they know that a big wave was coming?
When was the last time you noticed any group of large land animals hanging out at the beach all day? (seals and walruses don’t count)
I wonder how many aboriginal people living a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle were killed by the Tsunami.
Animals are better swimmers?
Seriously it’s kinda strange to be able to claim “no animals were found dead”. I’m sure lots of small rodents drowned.
Large animals probably never really existed near the coast or if they did, could swim. Remember, a lot of people died from injuries from building materials smashing into them. If you where in a non-developed area you probably wouldn’t get stabbed or crushed before drowning. I’d image most animals that saw water rushing up to them ran like heck while many humans stood around and looked.
If there is anything notable about this (and there may not be, it’s not like this anecdote is a scientifically controlled statistical study) I’d chalk it up to not so much of a sixth sense, but more acute senses (hearing was likely the most important in this case) and a built-in drive to get away from unknown, scary things.
Well as Rusalka noted, other than man, how many non-swimming animals that would be large enough for you to notice the corpses of, congregate near the edge of a saltwater ocean?
I can’t think of many.
I was living in California during the Salinas quake. We were dog-sitting a Dachsund who was constantly being chased by our springer spaniel. About 5 or 10 minutes before the tremors hit us, the Dachsund was chasing the Spaniel around, and they were going ape-shit. They knew something was going on.
Saying that animals can’t sense such things earlier than humans is just plain ignorant. Their senses are far more sensitive than ours. The difficult part of proving that they can, lies in reproducing seismological events, which are not easy to duplicate at all. Nor are any other such events.
I agree with previous posters saying that tiny animals could not have moved far enough away, and were probably swept away. Larger animals felt the vibrations and moved to higher land, not that there were a whole lot of really large animals in those coastal areas though.
Animals getting freaked out by natural disasters ahead of time, is a well enough documented phenomenon that I find it rather odd that people still doubt it. I guess they’ve never had pets.
When a tsunami hit the coast of Papua New Guinea, which has the highest concentration of hunter-gatherer tribes still extant, in 1998, 3,000 people died.
As for animals and earthquakes: why not? There is absolutely tons of anecdote to show that animals react bizarrely before quakes; I’d guess at a heightened sense of hearing and smell. A scientific study might be quite difficult to do, given the capricious nature of earthquakery.
I don’t doubt that animals can sense things humans can’t. What I doubt is that they have some mysterious, supernatural sixth sense that defies scientific explanation.
Yeah. We have earthquakes here in California. My cat sleeps at the end of my bed. We have an earthquake and I jump up & go “damn! We just had an earthquake!” I look at my cat snoozing away & say “hey! Stupid cat, you’re supposed to act strangely & warn me!” He’s like, “zzzzzzzz, huh, wah, izzit time to eat?”
I’m pretty sure if we ever had a tsunami I’d have to grab him by the scruff of the neck and take him with me.
That’s because the anecdotal evidence of animals not reacting when there are quakes isn’t worth relating.
“There was this horrible earthquake that killed thousands, and all through it my pet donkey just stood there eating straw! Oh my God! Call the scientific journals!”
I suspect some animals were killed, but given the disruption in normal food sources, I would also expect them to have been eaten by other animals (or humans) by now. Free dinners are seldom unclaimed for long in the wild.
That said - if something strange or unusual happens wild animals tend to flee, or at least retreat to what it feels is a safe distance to observe. People, on the other hand, are curious - they see something strange, they go towards it to get a better look.
In fact, a number of folks got caught by the big wave when they moved onto the exposed seabed after the water recession to 1) see what was there and 2) pick up stranded fish (that free dinner thing)
CNN is reporting that the water washed inland over 2 miles and they can’t even find a body of a rabbit.
I don’t think anyone is claiming they have a supernatural ability that defies scientific explanation, they are just saying “Look, no bodies: there must be a reason and we cannot explain it.” Every article I have read in the last few days is pretty clear to put “sixth-sense” in quotations to stress that it is the term they are using, not an answer they are providing. Most also go into how hard it is to scientifically test this since catastrophic random events are, well, random and thus hard to put into statistically significant terms/conditions.
The Economist touches on this as well and offers a suggestion of ground vibrations that are only recently being studied. And I like how they sum up their article:
“Whether any of this really has implications for such things as earthquake prediction is, of course, highly speculative. But it is a salutary reminder that the limitations of human senses can cause even competent scientists to overlook obvious lines of enquiry. Absence of evidence, it should always be remembered, is not evidence of absence.” emphasis mine
-Tcat
To comment on Broomstick after not previewing with my first post:
The conversation I had with my wife last night was along the topic of humans having that almost unique ability to overide fear and that inner-voice that says “hold on there, partner, shouldn’t we be running now?” You don’t see animals running into burning houses to save their kids…but humans do it regularly.
Animals don’t live on a set daily time-schedule, don’t have to impress the neighbors, don’t have to get up and go to work, etc etc. So when a slight, miniscule, almost imperceptible “something” comes along, what keeps them from acting on it? What keeps an animal (other than a barrier) from going “Hmm, what’s that? Maybe I should amble away from “it” and look for grass to chew on over there.” In fact, they don’t say “Hmmm” or “Maybe.” They don’t worry about looking silly or stoopid, or ask their friend, or ??? They simply react without hesitation.
But not us. We want to stand on the beach and get a good video clip of the big wave coming in so we can show uncle Charlie when we get back…
I have seen a video in a psychology class of a security camera in a convenience store. It shows a display rack with chips and snacks on it suddenly catch on fire (I forget, electrical spark or something). And what did all of the humans do? They stood around, and watched it. They didn’t react, didn’t leave, didn’t do a thing. People came in off the street to buy cigarettes and STOOD IN LINE while the rack started to really go up in flames. It was only when the alarm went off that everyone jumped and ran out of the store. People watched the fire grow, but were too self-conscious too do anything. An animal would have run away with no second thought. Simple survival.
So my argument is this: the animals didn’t make a decision. They didn’t argue, fret or think. “Something” just said “go away” and they did. Be it seismic vibrations, charged ionic particles from the static front of the tidal wave that a bird up high saw and flew away from, thus causing a bird down low to fly away from, thus causing a monkey to swing away from, thus causing a leopard to run away from or ??? We might never know exactly what causes “it”, but there seems to be enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that yes, indeed, something makes some animals leave at the appropriate time. And the second part of my argument would be that not only do us humans lack that “ability”, that even if we had “it,” we would probably ignore it.
-Tcat
You see the same thing anytime a fire alarm goes off in a building. When I was growing up, I was taught that if a fire alarm goes off, you LEAVE the building immediately, and you get as far AWAY from the said building as you can. However, I seem to be in a very small minority. Regardless of where I am, when a fire alarm goes off, the idiots around me just kind of stare off into space for a few seconds, then go back to whatever they were doing. When they are finally convinced that they have to leave, they get just outside the door, then stop and light up a cigarette.
I’ve heard stories from 9/11 that employers actually told employees to stay at their desks when the fire alarms went off in the twin towers, even AFTER feeling the shocks of the airplanes hitting the building.
Granted, more than 90% of fire alarms are false alarms, but I’d hate to be caught in one of the few real ones.
I find that likely considering just how mangled people were when they washed up. How do they expect to find the body of a rabbit when bodies of peope are sometimes unrecognizable?
And of course, just how large a population of rabbits existed in the city?
I don’t doubt animals have better senses than humans (and more sense, unlike the 40 people with kids who stood around watching as the water crashed into the dike they were on and were all killed).
This is an excerpt from a blog that was linked to in another thread in MPSIMS:
Y’know, this is the truly interesting thing, to me.
Has anyone seen a video of the beach with all the water sucked out to sea? I don’t imagine the camera survived the predicament.
What goes through the minds of a bunch of people who run out to see the seabed?
I wonder what it looked like. Anyone have a link to pictures of anti-tsunamis?
In the link I posted to above it mentions some of the thoughts that occurred to people who went out to gawk at the seabed. Read through that. I’ve not seen any pictures of it. They mention holes that remained with water (kids went to play in them) and lots of fish flopping around.
The news account doesn’t give us a good idea of how far inland the animals were originally or how far they had to move to get to safety.
If the animals were a hundred yards from shore and had to run three miles, then that’s something really special.
If on the other hand, they were 2 miles inland and had to run 400 ft, it’s not that newsworthy. Any sounds from the intial waves on shore would have reached them some fraction of a minute prior to the water, with adequate time to move this distance.
I expect when the whole story is figured out there will be plenty of dead animals around.
Some of animals senses are so much keener than ours, like a dog’s smell or a cat’s night vision, that we are unable to put ourselves in their place and imagine our reactions in such a case.
For example, my uncle had a shepherd dog that liked to go out to the field with him to farm. On occasion the dog would come slinking back from the field and hide in the barn. In half an hour or so we would begin to hear thunder in the distance followed by a thunderstorm.
One possible explanation for the events described is that the animals heard a disturbing sound and fled away from it. Away from it would be away from the beach and generally up hill.
The animals’ reaction to run away from strange sounds is different from that of most humans who, for example when they hear gunshots, often run toward strange noises so they can get in on the carnage.