Hahahahaha

[TransitJohn]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7431150

[laconicsax]

1. LOL

[ChadwickHenryWard]

2. There's all sorts of documented cases of animals behaving unusually before an earthquake.

I'd be sold, except for the fact that humans don't sense a thing. We're animals too. I think it's a case of counting the hits and skipping the misses. Animals act weird all the time. It's not always followed by an earthquake.

[lazarus]

3. bingo

Woos never catch on to that whole hits/misses thing.

[TZ]

4. Disagree

Animals DO have senses that many humans don't have. Migrating birds sense the magnetic field of the planet most likely.
The animals ALSO knew when the Tsunami of 2004 was coming...The elephants were documented panicking and running away... Elephants can hear ultrasonic sounds.
Please don't assume that humans have the same senses as a lot of animals. Its just NOT true.

[lazarus]

5. link? n/t

[TZ]

6. okay

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_050104_tsunami_animals.html

and here is some peer reviewed data about elephants..
http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/22/4/287

Also think about how bats, whales and dolphins use sonar to navigate their environment. They are much more sensitive to changes in the environment then we are. Its a survival trait for them.

Its not PSI/ESP like woos think but the idea of animals sensing natural disasters is NOT myth.

[lazarus]

7. did you read the whole article?

From the end of the NatGeo article:

Some U.S. seismologists, on the other hand, are skeptical. There have been documented cases of strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes. But the United States Geological Survey, a government agency that provides scientific information about the Earth, says a reproducible connection between a specific behavior and the occurrence of a quake has never been made.

"What we're faced with is a lot of anecdotes," said Andy Michael, a geophysicist at USGS. "Animals react to so many things—being hungry, defending their territories, mating, predators—so it's hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal."

In the 1970s a few studies on animal prediction were done by the USGS, "but nothing concrete came out of it," Michael said. Since that time the agency has made no further investigations into the theory.

And from the end of the Physiology Online article:

The second challenge is to improve what is understood about how ground-borne waves behave in the far field and in soils of different velocities. Since geophysicists normally collect data on body waves, high-amplitude surface waves produced by earthquakes (and elephant vocalizations) are considered noise and are filtered out of data sets. Once there is a better understanding of these two remaining aspects of the sender-receiver process, seismic communication could be viewed as adding distance to their already long-distance acoustic communication ability on top of adding an additional sense that the elephant could employ to better communicate and sense their environment.

Anecdotes and maybes. Here's an anecdote for you. Before the last earthquake we had hear, neither the dog, the cats, nor the birds acted unusually.

[TZ]

8. That's the USGS

They are not Physiologists.They don't know. But if you read the article about Elephant physiology you can see how it's possible. I think as a biologist, it's entirely possible. Would you like to answer also why animal mortality rate was so low from the tsunami? There are too many reports to ignore the conclusion. Again, as a person who studies evolutionary biology, I can see being sensitive to major events being a survival trait. Why is that so hard to believe? You aren't being skeptical as much as closed minded on this issue. Stop cherry picking your data. Even the USGS admitted one of the reasons they can't draw conclusions is because it's difficult to test the hypothesis. I will say this, the assumption that because humans can't do something with technogy, does not mean it does not happen in nature. That's a false and arrogant assumption. As for your observational data-- I can ask a few question.. Do you know for sure that no animal reacted. Would you even notice if some wild animals noticed, or some birds flew away? Are you aware that domestic animals are different from wild animals? How close were you to the epicenter ? How deep was the epicenter? Could make a difference? Even with observational evidence you can learn stuff. And while correlation is not causation, you can't also prove a negative from simple observation.

[lazarus]

9. the reason there were so few bodies

is that they were all washed out to sea. There weren't a whole lot of human corpses, either, except in structures.

I wasn't trying to disprove anything, by the way, merely showing that anecdotal evidence is meaningless.

And how did the elephants sense the tsunami days in advance? When no geologist was able to pick up on the impending doom? Surely something would have shown up on all the seismographs we have all over the world.

And cats haven't been domesticated long enough to be all that different from their wild ancestors.

Finally, I didn't cherry pick my data. I merely quoted your own sources back to you, and all they said was that they had anecdotal evidence in one article and no way to test in the other. That adds up to nothing.

[TZ]

10. Umm I never said the elephants sensed the tsunami

days in advance. It was maybe less than an hour in advance.... Have you ever also seen the documented cases of animals fleeing hours before a volcanic eruption? Its well documented to animals are much more sensitive to their environment...Its akin to prey animals being attuned to predator animals..If I'm ever in the wild, I watch the animals for cues...They know better than I whats going on in the world around them. They have to be or they wouldn't be alive today.
Why is it acceptable to know animals can figure out when a predator is in the area but not know that something that threatens the entire environment is imminent?
Yeah, woos take the story too far with this stuff, and the seals leaving the pier because of an earthquake days later is far fetched. Seals disappearing from a pier hours before a major quake centered nearby, wouldn't be. IMO.
Sometimes things are hard to test as the USGS pretty much admitted but I doesn't mean that there can't be corrolary data which can at least lend support to a hypothesis...
Your argument reminds me of the Navy's argument about their sonar and whether it is disruptive to whales..yeah, there's no actual data to prove that because its just to hard to test it, but given the circumstantial evidence that they opperate on the same frequencies its hard not to think there is some connection between their sonar and harm to whales.

[lazarus]

15. I think we're actually in agreement here

and were just arguing around the edges. Sorry it took so long to reply, I had stuff. :)

I can accept that animals detect something like an earthquake a few minutes before we do, but I don't accept that the elephants were able to detect it enough to flee far enough inland to escape the tsunami. The accounts I've read indicate the elephants were agitated about the same time as the earthquake happened. That gives them (in Thailand, at least) about two hours to flee the coast. I suppose that's possible.

Here's an article about the myth of no dead animals. There are more, but I think we're close enough on this issue to not need to debate it much more.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/050421_tsunami_myths.html

[ChadwickHenryWard]

11. Possible.

Subsonic frequencies could occur before an earthquake. I could buy the elephants sensing it, but I doubt the the magnetosphere could be disturbed enough for birds to notice.

[Orrex]

12. One thing worth remembering is all the animals who fled the Indonesia tsunami before it hit

And how, in the aftermath, they were found dead by the thousands.


The media was very quick to report on the animals' miraculous ESP, but I didn't hear a peep from the MSM when the reality was discovered.

[FiveGoodMen]

13. I'd like to read up on that. Is there a link handy?

[Orrex]

14. Here's one for starters

http://www.livescience.com/animals/050421_tsunami_myths.html

That's not the original article I read, though; I'll need to search for it. Stay tuned.

[FiveGoodMen]

16. Thanks. That's interesting

This is the first time I've heard the practically-no-animal-bodies info contradicted.

On the other hand, that article seems to focus on debunking supernatural interpretations (which I would never have entertained in any case).

My main point of curiosity centers on whether animals have instincts covering fairly rare events like this.

[Orrex]

17. That article makes a good point about the animals' natural senses

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that animals can discern stuff about the environment that we can't. I mean, a dog's nose is only the most obvious example, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that animals with superhuman hearing (elephants, dogs, etc.) can detect the extremely low-frequency rumblings of the Earth's crust or an approaching tsunami.

In my view, the assumption of a "sixth sense" or "psychic ability" is actually a disservice to these animals' remarkable natural abilities.

(For the record, I'm not saying that you were claiming a psychic component to their abilities!)

[HuckleB]

18. That is hilarious.

Apparently, evidence-base medicine is now labeled and dismissed as "flame bait" by the GD crowd.

:rofl: