Basic Instincts

Throughout history, humans have recorded instances of animals behaving oddly ahead of catastrophic natural phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions or earthquakes, as if these creatures could sense them.

For example, Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, claimed that rats, dogs, snakes, and weasels left the city of Helice shortly before an earthquake in 373 BCE. Similarly, snakes and rats were observed escaping their burrows in 1975 just before the Haicheng earthquake in China.

A team of scientists who believe this behavior isn’t just a coincidence are now recruiting a wide array of fauna to help them anticipate disasters, tracking their movements from space.

In a program to be launched next year by the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (Icarus), tiny transmitters will be fitted to mammals, birds, and insects, intended to monitor their movements with satellites.

“Ultimately, we hope to launch a fleet of around six satellites and establish a global observation network that will not only provide details of wildlife movements and animal health across the planet but reveal how creatures respond to natural phenomena like earthquakes,” project leader Martin Wikelski, from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, told the Guardian.

The researchers say that this program will not only study how the animals react to natural events, but also provide new insights into migration patterns, the spread of diseases, and the impact of the climate crisis on these animals.

Early experiments have already been conducted on Mount Etna in Sicily. “We have found the behavior of goats is pretty good at predicting large volcanic eruptions,” said Wikelski.

Before an eruption, the goats became nervous and refused to move to higher pastures as they usually do. “They know beforehand what is coming,” he added. “We don’t know how they do it, but they do.”

Dogs, sheep, and other farm animals have also been monitored on the Abruzzo Mountain near Rome. The researchers found that the animals acted in ways that predicted seven out of eight major earthquakes which occurred in the region over the past 12 years.

During the build-up to an earthquake, tectonic plates slide across each other under enormous pressures, and that throws out ions from the rocks into the air. The animals may be reacting to that, researchers say.

The conducted studies and Icarus have only been made possible through the advancement of tagging technology. The tiny digital transmitters included small lithium batteries and cheap minuscule GPS devices, making the tags for the animals only a few grams of weight. This now allows researchers to track most vertebrate species.

This technology can be used not only on how animals react to geological changes, but also for studying wildlife health from space. For example, when attaching electronic ear tags to wild boars, researchers can analyze changes in the behavior of the animals that show if they have been infected with African swine fever.

According to the researchers, knowing when a disease outbreak occurs in the wild can be important to preventing the spread of the disease to farms.

The program will launch next year using a small satellite the team has built called the Icarus CubeSat. Afterward, researchers want to scale up to monitor animals, birds, and insects as they migrate.

They are hoping to figure out which species respond to which events and how reliable they are in their response in order to construct this “animal early warning system,” they wrote. Essentially, harnessing animals’ “seventh” sense to benefit humanity.