Can dogs help predict an earthquake?
The company that made the PetPace biometric collar claims that the health data it monitors may also have the potential to Possibility predicting an earthquake.
A dog's pulse, heart rate variability, temperature, breathing and activity are recorded and sent to the cloud of PetPace in real time, according to Asaf Dagan, chief scientist and co-founder of PetPace, the parent company of Animal Alerts, to ABC News. An AI algorithm then determines the dog's overall stress level.
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"The idea is that if we can monitor the behaviour and stress levels of animals... then we use advanced models artificial intelligence and machine learning to correlate it with geophysical data such as earthquakes of different magnitudes," Dagan said.
However, there is currently no convincing evidence that dogs can accurately predict an earthquake.
Geologist Wendy Bohon expressed that a smart collar for dogs could help predict earthquakes.
"I've never seen a conclusive study that shows that animals can predict earthquakes or that animals know that an earthquake will happen," Bohon told ABC News, adding that earthquakes are difficult to predict.
The earliest report of unusual animal behaviour before a major earthquake was in 373 BC in Greece, according to the US Geological Survey.
Various species - including rats, weasels, snakes and centipedes - reportedly left their homes and headed for Security several days before a catastrophic earthquake hit the region, according to the USGS.
A 2012 study found that 49% dogs showed a significant increase in stress the day before a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest in February 2001. The dogs may have been subjected to bias, smaller earthquakes occurring before a larger one or acoustic waves created by the movement of tectonic plates.
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"Sometimes animals can sense the arrival of waves from far away that are too small to feel," Bohon said. "And so we don't notice those first small waves arriving ... it may appear that animals are anticipating the earthquake, when in fact they're reacting to the first arrivals of waves that we're just not attuned to. "
These primordial waves, or "P" waves, travel at a rate of several miles per second from the epicenter, which could make them more noticeable to animals, according to the USGS.
Very few people notice the smaller "P" waves, which arrive before the larger "S" waves, the USGS said.
In a 2020 study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany wrote that they accurately measured the increase in activity in a group of farm animals before seismic activity.
Scientists measured the activity of many cows, dogs and sheep on a farm near the epicentre of the 6.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Norcia in central Italy in October 2016 and observed strong animal responses before an earthquake of magnitude 3.8 or greater. Before the earthquake, the animals were equipped with sensors GPS, extremely sensitive instruments that record movements in any direction.
According to the study, the farm animals seemed to expect vibrations anywhere from one to 20 hours in advance. They reacted earlier when they were closer to the origin, the researchers said.
Dogs are suitable for behavioural observation. They can smell scents and hear high-pitched sounds that are undetectable to humans, giving them the ability to sense things outside of human perception, according to the American Kennel Club.
Social media users claimed the animals were behaving strangely in the hours before a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey in February 2023, killing more than 21,000 people. The reported behavior included birds flying strangely and dogs howling, the Washington Post reported.
In 2015, the researchers observed changes in animal behaviour three weeks before a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in a region of the Peruvian Amazon in 2011, according to a study published in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth.
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PetPace, manufacturer of the biometric dog collar, is conducting a study in Lima, Peru, which is experiencing 90% of total seismic Activity around the world due to its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Source: abcnews.go.com
