Can toads predict earthquakes?

Maybe. Consider: In 2009,

Dr Grant was studying toads 74km away in San Ruffino Lake in central Italy, when she recorded the toads behaving oddly.


Five days before the earthquake, the number of male common toads in the breeding colony fell by 96%.


That is highly unusual for male toads: once they have bred, they normally remain active in large numbers at breeding sites until spawning has finished.


Yet spawning had barely begun at the San Ruffino Lake site before the earthquake struck.

Also, no weather event could be linked to the toads' disappearance.


Three days before the earthquake, the number of breeding pairs also suddenly dropped to zero.

Significantly,

Some studies have been done on how domestic animals respond, but measuring the response of wild animals is more difficult.


Even those that have been shown to react, such as fish, rodents and snakes tend to do so shortly before an earthquakes strikes, rather than days ahead of the event.

For more, go here. (“Toads can 'predict earthquakes' and seismic activity”, Matt Walker, Editor, Earth News, BBC News, March 31, 2010)

So the toads have an early warning system, one that would be useful to know.

See also: Animal minds: Our dog’s world is not like ours

Humans project guilt feelings onto their dogs

and, of course, Oscar the Deathcat and “What is it like to be a bat?

Photo: Common toad (bufo bufo). Creative Commons License

Canadian journalist David Warren on Oscar the deathcat!

Oscar is the cat who was written up in the New England Journal if Medicine for predicting when people in an old age home would die. (I say he did it by scent.)

Anyway, David Warren, acknowledging Oscar, commented amusingly on catly skills in general:

... I had adopted, or rather been adopted by (unlike dogs, cats choose their masters), one of these cats. I named him Ferdinand, after Magellan, the Portuguese explorer in the Spanish service, for his cathemeral activities took him on a circuit of considerable extent.

He was the sort of cat I would myself choose for a voyage of circumnavigation. It would have to be a cat, as I am persuaded by nautical memoirists from Joshua Slocum to Lorenzo Ricciardi, that goats make poor sailors. The virtues of cats, at sea, are attested by many of the feline voyagers themselves, from Trim, the famous cat of the famous Captain Flinders; to Mrs Chippy, aboard Shackleton’s Endurance; to Pwe, the “ineffective hunter of albatrosses” who crewed with Miles and Beryl Smeeton.

Don't like cats? I will try to find you something about dogs then.

Actually, I have often thought that it would be better to find a dog who could do what Oscar does. A dog can be much more easily trained to alert people to a situation than a cat. And I BET goats make poor sailors!

Home personnel knew only by the change in Oscar's behaviour that a patient's death was imminent , not because the cat thought it his business to alert them.

See also: Can people simply decide when to die?

Can people simply decide to die?

Recently, I wrote about "deathcat" - a cat named Oscar with a very good record for predicting when patients in a nursing home were within a few hours of death.

Of course, Oscar's human friends were elderly patients suffering with dementia, and nothing was being done to prevent them from dying, so he probably picked up vital clues by scent or some similar method. But what about people who just die when they are ready, in the full knowledge that it is time to move on?

That does happen, according to coronary care physician Hugh Montgomery, who gives this year's Royal Institution's Christmas Science lectures in the UK.

As Stuart Jeffries reports in The Guardian (December 11, 2007),

He tells the story of a church organist he treated. "She had a condition which meant she had to be on a drip, but she kept pulling it out. She told me: 'I don't want a drip any more.' I said: 'Your chances of surviving are very low if you don't keep it.' But she told me that Jesus was waiting on the other side and was calling her. She was with her husband and so I said: 'If you're both comfortable with that, do that. I can give you pain relief.' As I got up to go she said: 'Aren't you going to kiss me goodbye?' and so I gave her a kiss and left. Moments later she was dead.

"What I have found again and again is that dying patients hold on for a loved one to arrive - say for a son to get the visa to fly to London and see mother in hospital for one last time. My father, who was unconscious in hospital for the last couple of days of his life, died at the rare moment when we - my mother, sisters and me - were in the room at the same time."

A number of palliative care physicians have told me similar stories. One even went so far as to say that people in their nineties can die pretty much whenever they want to, by ceasing to try hard to remain alive - which makes sense, when you think about it.

Montgomery's thesis is certianly consistent with the basic hypothesis of The Spiritual Brain that the mind is real, and not simply the buzz of neurons in the brain. But the main thing to see here, in my view, is how much we actually mean to each other - that is, how much we promote - or diminish - each other's survival. Good thing to keep in mind during the holiday season, which often stresses relationships.

There is much else of interest in Jeffries' article, including a discussion of relative mortality rates among grades of civil servants. Highly recommended.