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Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?

CNN and many major media outlets do a very fine job of promoting misinformation in their headlines and the article minimizes the actual data. Drama-scary-clickbait.
 
Victory said:

Video: Video allegedly shows birds behaving erratically before Turkey earthquake struck​

https://metro.co.uk/video/video-all...erratically-turkey-earthquake-struck-2871959/


In an interview (think BBC News?) a man said his canary started banging it's head on it's cage a few hours prior to the earthquake.
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I saw this video when it was posted to social media. Many commentators noted that this behavior was not unusual. Birds in the city do this normally.

The claim of one animal acting odd is not reliable evidence at all. It's extremely difficult to document strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes. It's almost always something that is noted after the event.

Edit: Also the subtitle for the video that says "researchers say birds can detect natural disasters coming" is nonsense. No research shows this.
 
Sharon Hill said:
The claim of one animal acting odd is not reliable evidence at all. It's extremely difficult to document strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes. It's almost always something that is noted after the event.
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It is worth collating each incident, so that it can form evidence of a pattern, if such a pattern exists upon careful analysis of a large amount of data.

It is also of note that the bird's owner believed the bird's behaviour to have been an early warning signal of the earthquake.

The forum has numerous instances where (in particular) dogs have been scared or apprehensive of something that cannot be seen, or of entering a certain place, which then was experienced by their owners as 'spooky" or "unsettling".

All worth collating.
 
Victory said:
It is worth collating each incident, so that it can form evidence of a pattern, if such a pattern exists upon careful analysis of a large amount of data.

It is also of note that the bird's owner believed the bird's behaviour to have been an early warning signal of the earthquake.

The forum has numerous instances where (in particular) dogs have been scared or apprehensive of something that cannot be seen, or of entering a certain place, which then was experienced by their owners as 'spooky" or "unsettling".

All worth collating.
Click to expand...
Anecdotes about animal behavior anomalies have been collected over centuries.
They've led to nothing, unfortunately.

Interpreting animal behaviors is subjective and useless for coming to any conclusions.

In the case of earthquakes, the situation of each event is too complex to be repeated in time or in a laboratory. In some instances, there may be gases or ionization or small tremors that suggest something is amiss. But that won't happen in all cases. So animal prediction is unhelpful.
 
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