The chickens are restless

摘要

Seismologists tend to greet the idea that some animals know when an earthquake is coming with a sizeable degree of scepticism. Though reports of odd animal behaviour before a quake date back at least as far as ancient Greece, the data are all anecdotal. They are also subject to vagaries of the human psyche: "confirmation bias" ensures that strange behaviour not followed by earthquakes gets forgotten, and "flashbulb memory" can, should an earthquake strike, imbue quotidian animal antics with great import after the fact. The us Geological Survey-arguably the world's authority on earthquakes-undertook studies in the 1970s to find out if animals really did predict them, but came up empty-handed. However, the latest data, just published in Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, are not just anecdotal.