It has long been known that erratic animal behaviour often occurs before earthquakes. Could the dead oarfish found recently on California’s beaches be an omen of doom?
In October, two giant oarfish corpses—one 18 feet long and the other 14 feet—washed up on beaches in California. Two other giant oarfish washed up on California beaches in 2010 and 2011.
It is rare for these sea serpents, which can grow up to 50 feet long, to venture away from the deep ocean.
In March 2010, a year before the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph reported that Japan was “bracing itself” for a seismic episode, the reason being that at least a dozen oarfish had either washed ashore or were caught in nets in the prefectures of Ishikawa, Toyama, Kyoto, Shimane, and Nagasaki, near what would eventually be the quake’s epicentre.
That same year there was a smaller earthquake in Japan, as well as quakes in Chile, Taiwan, and Haiti.
Japanese and Chinese scientists take the study of animals and seismology very seriously. The Japanese call oarfish the “Messenger from the Sea God’s Palace,” as the sea serpents tended to rise from their icy ocean depths prior to seismic activity, according to myth.
Some scientists speculate these bottom-dwelling fish are more sensitive to seismic shifts and that may be why they are beaching themselves, while others say the beachings are simply a coincidence.
However, the evidence that animals behave out of character prior to seismic activity has always been noted. In Helice, Greece (373 BC), rats, snakes, and weasels fled the city days before a quake struck. Interestingly, these specific animals/reptiles are ground-dwellers.
Before an earthquake, many pet owners note erratic behaviour in their animals, such as incessant whining. Chickens will stop laying eggs. Bees temporarily abandon their hives. Toads left their ponds in China before the 2008 earthquake, and before a quake in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009.
A study in Germany showed that red ants not only tend to build their mounds on fault lines but will stay outside their mounds prior to quakes. It is surmised that there are changes in carbon dioxide and electromagnetism that the ants are able to detect.
Before the quake that hit the east coast of the U.S. in 2011, zookeepers reported an increase in “vocalisation”—the animals were panicking.
There are many theories. One is that wild and domestic creatures detect electrical changes in the air or, perhaps, gas being released from the ground. Or they just feel the earth moving from foreshocks and we do not.
There have been recent studies on a new theory that a build-up of static electricity may precede tremors; perhaps animals sense this too.
Elissa Michele Zacher is a writer with publications in Apt, an online literary magazine, The Northeast Poetry Journal, and Freedom Press, among others. A U.K. native, she currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
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