Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes

reillymj writes "Researchers claim toads sensed a severe earthquake last year five days before it hit. Last spring's L'Aquila earthquake devastated the medieval city of the same name in Italy. Five days earlier, a group of biologists noticed some toads behaving strangely in a pond nearby that would later be the quake's epicenter."

Comments

Pfft

[somersault]

They didn't predict it. They CAUSED it.

Re:Pfft

[Jurily]

This should be an ad for a university.

"Study biology and you too can get excited watching frogs fuck!"

Re:Pfft

[tomhudson]

Scientists are doing a lot of strange things nowadays ...Scientists Use Gene Splicing To Create Real "Cadbury Easter Eggs"

Useful

[VisualD]

So all we need now is a way of measuring this reliably and we canALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD

Facepalm

[DryGrian]

The pinnacle of scientific achievement, obviously.

Don't RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. Don't read it. I'm going to summarize it for you:

Some scientists noticed frogs acting "strange". A couple days later, an earthquake followed. Scientists wondered if the frogs were somehow aware of the earthquake. They had no particular reason to believe they were. Other scientists interviewed on this matter say probably not. People retroactively attribute all kinds of things to big events that follow.

The article ends: "For now at least, the hunt for a way to predict earthquakes must continue."

That's it. You're welcome.

Re:Don't RTFA

[VJ42]

That's right. Don't read it. I'm going to summarize it for you:

Some scientists noticed frogs acting "strange". A couple days later, an earthquake followed. Scientists wondered if the frogs were somehow aware of the earthquake. They had no particular reason to believe they were. Other scientists interviewed on this matter say probably not. People retroactively attribute all kinds of things to big events that follow.

The article ends: "For now at least, the hunt for a way to predict earthquakes must continue."

That's it. You're welcome.

No, I heard the researcher on the radio yesterday; the toads unexpectedly left the area for a few days & whilst they were gone, the quake hit; the toads returned after the quake, she had a couple of hypotheses about how the toads could detect the coming quake, but freely admitted she had no strong evidence for them.

Re:Don't RTFA

[WrongSizeGlass]

No, I heard the researcher on the radio yesterday; the toads unexpectedly left the area for a few days & whilst they were gone, the quake hit; the toads returned after the quake

I'm sorry to be the one to have to burst this bubble, but toads cannot travel far enough in a couple of days to leave the large area affected by an earthquake. And if they just so happened to be right out the outlying portion of the area affected by the earthquake, then they would have been too far away from the epicenter to have detected it anyway, if they could, which they can't, because they are toads.

Re:Don't RTFA

[eldavojohn]

No, I heard the researcher on the radio yesterday; the toads unexpectedly left the area for a few days & whilst they were gone, the quake hit; the toads returned after the quake, she had a couple of hypotheses about how the toads could detect the coming quake, but freely admitted she had no strong evidence for them.

More anecdotes if you want them. I was on Grand Cayman a week after Haiti was struck with an earthquake. Anyway, offshore a large earthquake happened. Coincidentally I was at the turtle farm (a massive sea turtle farm on the island). Now, all we felt was a bit of a brief shaking but the sea turtles were flipping out during it and for about ten minutes afterward. They were trying to crawl out of their cement tanks and looked like they didn't care what was getting scratched up, they just wanted up and out. I asked one of the workers what was going on with the turtles and he said he'd never seen it. Then we were told that an earthquake had just hit offshore (I was extremely intoxicated on some variant of rum so I 'missed' the earthquake).

I'm not saying they predicted it but they sure exhibited a crazy amount of sensitivity and acted like it was the end of the world when it happened. More so than my drunk ass could conjure anyway. I remember hearing that animals left for higher ground during tsunamis but never gave it much credibility but who knows? Sounds far fetched but it's a difficult if not impossible thing to prove or disprove I suppose.

Re:Don't RTFA

[shock1970]

So the researchers studying the toads obviously don't know much about them other than their mating habits. The toads in my area leave sometime around the mid to late fall. But it's not like they're packing their bags and catching the cheapest Southwest flight to Miami. They really can't leave because even if they hop 5 miles away, its still going to be cold. Perhaps a more astute observation would be that the frogs were not observed to be in the area, which doesn't necessarily imply that they left the area, but possibly, like they do in the winter, burrowed themselves in the ground.

Toads Say Slashdot Editors Are Morons

[clarkkent09]

From TFA:

I consulted with Susan Hough, a seismologist at Caltech. After having a read of the paper, here's what she had to say: This is a good example of bad science. The earthquake prediction heyday of the 1970s was launched and sustained by similar studies: people who found snippets of data after the fact that showed an apparent correlation between some signal and an eventual earthquake. This is not good statistics. You can't select data after the fact. In this case, there's no way to know what kind of fluctuations are normally seen in toad activity, or what else might have been going on in the study area that could have influenced toad behavior.

Slashdot interpretation: Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes!!!

Real funny thing

[oldhack]

Nowadays, I can't tell the difference between your typical slashdot stories and April Fool's Day stories.

Everyday is April Fool's day here.

Re:Real funny thing

[VJ42]

Nowadays, I can't tell the difference between your typical slashdot stories and April Fool's Day stories.

Everyday is April Fool's day here.

This isn't an April fools story, the BBC also has coverage. Note the date:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8593000/8593396.stm

That's nothing.

[kirill.s]

The same toads can also predict the release date of Duke Nukem Forever.

Oh no! Another earthquake predictor...

[ctrl-alt-canc]

Whenever I read a piece of news like this, I remeber what happened at a scientific congress many years ago.
A well known seismologist (I will omit his name...) published a paper claiming that he found a way to predict earthquakes. Some time later at a conference a young and brilliant mathematician showed, using the very same equations and methods described by the seismologist, that not only it happened that every time the seismologist did a prediction an earthquake happened, but that the reverse was true, i.e. after an earthquake the seismologist would announce an earthquake prediction. A very inconvenient problem....the conference room was filled with laughs.
The mathematician then continued by demonstrating a well-posed method for earthquake prediction that was properly honouring the cause-effect relationship, but the predictor was pretty useless, since it could forecast only a small fraction of all earthquakes happening in the area under study (I think about 15% or so).
I believe that this anecdote suggests that whenever the newspaper (or Slashdot) talks about exotic methods for earthquake prediction, one can safely jump to the following piece of news. Making earthquakes forecasts is a very thought topic, and it is very unlikely toads will ever be of some help...

Excellent Technological Breakthrough

[Foobar of Borg]

Now that we have frogs to predict the earthquakes, we can more effectively employ sheep bladders to prevent them!