When the earthquake hit central Italy on Oct. 26, 2016, Martin Wikelski and his colleagues descended on the site in less than 24 hours. Wikelski, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, wanted to test a hunch that has been around for millennia — that animals portend earthquakes. A nearby farm in the earthquake-hit area provided a perfect landscape to test this theory.
Now, after sifting through months of behavioral data of farm animals and 18,000 (mostly minor) earthquakes later, Wikelski and his colleagues see a pattern. In a study published in Ethology, they report evidence of animals reacting in a consistent manner before an impending quake.
The study started shortly after the October earthquake. Wikelski and his colleagues rushed to a farmland in the affected area to tag farm animals, hoping to understand how the animals were reacting to the quake’s aftershocks. They tagged ...
