Attention: Toad Warning

Following every earthquake, there’s the inevitable news story about how some animals started behaving strangely much before the event.

Following every earthquake, there’s the inevitable news story about how some animals started behaving strangely much before the event. Two researchers from the UK, one from Open University and the other from Oxford, studying this phenomenon, have found out that toads started changing their behaviour a full five days before an earthquake. For the study, they monitored reproductively active common toads for 29 days in L’Aquila, Italy, an earthquake prone region. Five days before an earthquake, the toads stopped spawning and reduced their activity. How they become aware is still not established, but it corresponds with changes in the ionosphere.

earthquaketoad