Ants can sense earthquakes a day in advance

Ants can sense earthquakes a day in advance


NEW DELHI: Ants know when an earthquake is about to strike, researchers have discovered. Their behavior changes significantly prior to the quake and they resume normal functioning only a day after it.

Gabriele Berberich of the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany presented these findings on Thursday at the European Geosciences Union annual meeting in Vienna according to LiveScience.

Berberich and her colleagues discovered that red wood ants preferred to build their colonies right along active faults in Germany. They counted 15,000 ant mounds lining the faults. These faults are fractures where the Earth violently ruptures in earthquakes.

Using a special camera mounted software that tracked changes in activity, Berberich and her colleagues tracked the ants round the clock for three years, 2009 to 2012. They found that the ants' behavior changed only when the quake was over magnitude 2. There were 10 earthquakes between magnitude 2.0 and 3.2 during this period, and many smaller ones. Humans can also sense quakes of over magnitude 2 only.

According to Berberich, normal ant activity consists of going about collecting food etc. during the day and resting in the night. But before an earthquake, the ants did not retreat into their mound in the night and bustled around outside it. This strange and abnormal behavior continued till a day after the earthquake, Berberich told a news conference, according to LiveScience.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-04-12/science/38490799_1_magnitude-earthquake-faults