Disaster Prediction System & Creative Review coverage...

We have devised a disaster prediction system based on the L'Aquila earthquake toads, and Sumatran tsunami water buffalo case studies. Recently, Creative Review Magazine have run a fascinating article discussing what designers can do to help in disasters. We were lucky enough to see our Disaster Prediction scheme get a brief write up in the May 2011 issue:

In large cities where animal numbers are low what options are available? Lovely film by Nokia about keeping bees in populated areas.

Nokia - HK Honey from The Silentlights on Vimeo.

GUEST BLOGGER: BARBARA NAPIER, ANIMO.

We are delighted to publish our first guest blogger - Barbara Napier, founder and president of ANIMO, an organisation for all types of investigation into animal assisted therapy. Enjoy...

ANIMO SPAIN:

Animals can predict weather AND human phenomena

By: Barbara Napier

My specialty is more in how animals can predict seizures and improve health in humans, but together with my father, a scientist, we started a study on how animals and insects can predict natural disasters and weather. In the sixties, we lived for a year in Maryland, USA. Where we lived, everyone had two thousand acres with farm animals in the fields. Maryland is famous for its electrical storms, which are very deadly. While the skies were still blue, the cattle would head for the most remote section of pasture and huddle in a circle, always with the young on the inside. Within a matter of six to twelve hours, an electrical storm would move in. The Native American Indians always followed the lead of the buffalo and the wild horses. Before a tornado they would move off the plains and into a low lying area, surrounded by hills and the Indians would follow. How did they know a tornado was coming? How did they know where to go to save themselves? No one seems to have the answer, yet the animals know. We have learned to rely too much on technology and have left behind some of the most valuable information left to us by our forefathers.

When we moved to Spain in the seventies, we became once again interested in this subject. I had started ANIMO, a national association for the investigation into all types of animal assisted therapy. We figured that saving lives also fit into the association. ANIMO ran a center to help severely disabled people lead a better quality of life by incorporating animals. We found that not only could dogs predict epileptic seizures but so could horses, up to half an hour before the seizure. Seizure dogs are now legal in America as are dogs that can tell a diabetics sugar level, and other assistance dogs such as hearing dogs and dogs for the physically disabled. The main part of ANIMO concentrated in therapeutic riding and is now involved in a new research project; called ANIMO-ALBERO, where we have proven that the horse can make dysfunctional organs function, reduce pain, increase circulation and a list that gets longer every day. It is a program to improve the length and quality of life in people with terminal illness or to help remove the toxins and side effects from medical treatments such as chemotherapy and steroids.

Because of my father’s love of the sea and mine of riding through the countryside talking to farmers, we started to collect some interesting information. The fisherman all knew before a storm was coming because the seagulls would stop following their ships and head inland; it was a good sign that they should follow suit. On a very warm sunny day a farmer showed me three flying ants and told me it would rain the next day. This was very important for her so she could get her hay and other things that couldn’t get wet, inside. The weather man said it would be a sunny summer week. He was wrong and the farmer saved her crops. We have swallows that migrate to Africa every winter and return to their same nests or home in the spring, to start their new families. What month they come in and leave in, not only determines how many clutches of eggs they will have, but when we will have an early spring or early fall. They have between two to six clutches of eggs a season, depending on the length of the season.

As a psychology major with a minor in cultural anthropology I joined in some interesting debates at university. As far as animals detecting illness in people, they have also now found that dogs can predict cancer long before a CAT scan. The psychology department felt that the animals could see an electrical field around the body or an aura and could see when there was a flaw. The scientific side felt that it all had to do with the olfactory ability of the animals, assuming that the body gave off a certain odour before a seizure or other problem.

In tribes throughout Africa and the aborigines in Australia, apparently simple people know how to follow the animals, birds and insects to keep out of harm’s way or to protect their crops and farm animals. It is common knowledge that animals, free in nature, know before an earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, we just have to learn to understand what they are telling us.

Governments spend billions of dollars every year trying to predict the weather and equally the medical profession on diagnosing illness. If our university students took it upon themselves to get their universities involved and start investigating by interviewing people who have no technology yet their livelihood depends on nature, we would probably know much more than we do today. For example missionaries and the Red Cross, people who go into outlying areas and help the natives, would be a good starting point. This study could include just about every field of research and could save lives while improving animal awareness.

Thanks again Barbara. Be sure to check out her blog here: http://animospain.blogspot.com/

A little hint of the next output from The Animal Weather Project - video forecasts.
Also, guest posters and infographics on the way soon.

Toad Earthquake Prediction?

Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes. The evidence comes from a population of toads which left their breeding colony three days before an earthquake that struck L'Aquila in Italy in 2009. How toads sensed the quake is unclear, but most breeding pairs and males fled.
They reacted despite the colony being 74km from the quake's epicentre, say biologists in the Journal of Zoology.
It is hard to objectively and quantifiably study how animals respond to seismic activity, in part because earthquakes are rare and unpredictable. 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. However, biologist Dr Rachel Grant of the Open University, in Milton Keynes, UK, was routinely studying the behaviour of various colonies of common toads on a daily basis in Italy around the time a massive earthquake struck. Her studies included a 29-day period gathering data before, during and after the earthquake that hit Italy on 6 April 2009. The quake, a 6.3-magnitude event, struck close to L'Aquila city, about 95km (60 miles) north-east of Rome.
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%.

AMPHIBIAN PHENOMENA

Dr Grant has also shown that many amphibians around the world synchronise their mating activity by the full Moon, a phenomenon not reported before. The world's first truly monogamous amphibian was described earlier this year.
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. While spawn was found at the site up to six days before the earthquake, and again six days after it, no spawn was laid during the so-called earthquake period - the time from the first main shock to the last aftershock. "Our study is one of the first to document animal behaviour before, during and after an earthquake," says Dr Grant.
She believes the toads fled to higher ground, possibly where they would be at less risk from rock falls, landslides and flooding.

Exactly how the toads sense impending seismic activity is unclear. The shift in the toads' behaviour coincided with disruptions in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer of the earth's atmosphere, which researchers detected around the time of the L'Aquila quake using a technique known as very low frequency (VLF) radio sounding.

Such changes to the atmosphere have in turn been linked by some scientists to the release of radon gas, or gravity waves, prior to an earthquake. In the case of the L'Aquila quake, Dr Grant could not determine what caused the disruptions in the ionosphere. However, her findings do suggest that the toads can detect something.
"Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system," she says.

One other study has quantified an animal's response to a major earthquake.
Researchers had the serendipitous opportunity to measure how the behaviour of the desert harvester ant (Messor pergandei) changed as the ground began to tremble in the Mojave Desert, California, on 28 June 1992.
The largest quake to hit the US in four decades struck during the middle of an ongoing study, which measured how many ants walked the trails to and from the colony, the distributions of worker ants and even how much carbon dioxide the ants produced.
However, in response to that 7.4 magnitude quake, the ants did not appear to alter their behaviour at all.

From the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8593000/8593396.stm

More information & comment: http://www.staunchusa.com/tag/open-university/

Eyewitness Video

Weather Prediction

Great Article about animals and reading precursors of major geological events...

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms/animals-predict-weather1.htm