PBS program examines animals as disaster detectors

Who needs The Weather Channel? Man’s best friend just might be man’s best disaster detector.

It works even better if your animal pal is an elephant or amphibious hippo. But dogs and cats can also do the trick when it comes to knowing an earthquake is on the way.

Some call it anecdotal evidence, though retired San Francisco Bay Area geologist James Berkland is writing science papers about the spike in lost-pet newspaper ads in the days preceding such tremors as the massive 1989 World Series jolt.

Going from 15 lost-dog ads to 57 was such a jump that Berkland called his local paper, which dutifully reported the seemingly silly prediction – on the very day of the quake.

“Can Animals Predict Disaster?,” airing tonight as part of PBS’ “Nature” series, collects testimony such as that and at the same time tracks scientific attempts to explain this long-observed phenomenon through the tested use of infrasound and electrical energy.

Its explorations range from zoos in Cincinnati and Oakland, Calif., to nature preserves in Sri Lanka and Botswana. Add time travels to encompass fourth century B.C. rats and worms fleeing a Greek temblor and Japanese folk tales of an “earthquake catfish” used for predictions.

While this hour isn’t immediate enough to include the recent American hurricanes, the center point is certainly seared into our recent memory – last December’s Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed a quarter-million people but surprisingly few animals.

Japanese researcher Motoji Ikeya has cataloged 1,200 pet indications of the 1995 Kobe quake, which he relates to growing pressure in the granite and quartz landscape there conducting electromagnetic energy. Small fish and reptiles are his experimental subjects.

Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell studies elephants in Africa’s Kalahari who place their trunks on the ground in a “freezing posture” that may turn them into “an amazing infrasound detecting machine.” Then she takes that knowledge to the Oakland zoo where an elephant is trained to respond to different pulses – and grows increasingly sensitive to them.

This elephant can communicate what she senses with movements of her trunk, but biologist Bill Barklow finds amphibious hippos in the Botswana marshlands can relay their infrasound threat warnings from herd to herd downriver.

What does it all mean? Unfortunately, tying it all together to truly understand this animal phenomenon – or to make real (human) use of it – is still a work in progress.