Meus Caros,
O post de hoje é unicamente para vos educar acerca das capacidades dos animaizinhos que nos rodeiam para prever catástrofes naturais...
Assim segue um artigo do Wall Street Journal:
HONG KONG -- Forty-eight hours before a devastating earthquake ripped through southwestern China, Jiang Weisong, director of the seismology bureau in the southern city of Nanning, worried that a tremor was imminent.
His reason? The cobras at nearby snake farms were behaving strangely.
"They'd stopped eating, and they were jumping in their cages," says Mr. Jiang, who videotaped the unusual behavior in the days leading up to the earthquake. "We believed there might be a big quake, but we weren't sure where it would be."
Two days later, one of the worst earthquakes in three decades pummeled China's southwestern Sichuan province.
Despite decades of study, there are still no reliable systems for predicting earthquakes. But Mr. Jiang's research is reviving a question that has long occupied the gray zone between science and folklore: whether animals can pick up signals undetectable to humans to predict seismic events.
The theory has drawn skepticism, though not outright dismissal, from Western scientists. "You can't just dismiss this out of hand," says Joseph Kirschvink, a professor of geobiology at the California Institute of Technology. "It's not unreasonable for these animals to have evolved seismic-escape responses in this fashion." He believes more study is needed, but notes that snakes, as vertebrates, "need navigation systems, and they're very sensitive to vibrations in the ground."
In China, cobras are a restaurant delicacy raised on farms. In 2006, Mr. Jiang and his team in Nanning started an unusual earthquake-detection scheme that involves monitoring dozens of snake nests 24 hours a day for signs of erratic behavior prior to earthquakes. Mr. Jiang claims the snakes have already predicted numerous small tremors.
In 373 B.C., historians recorded that rats, snakes and weasels abandoned the Greek city of Helice in droves just days before a quake devastated the city. After the December 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami, officials in Sri Lanka, Thailand and elsewhere reported that herds of antelope, elephants, and deer fled to hilltop safety just minutes before the wave hit, leading to a remarkably low number of animal casualties.
The Chinese have long given credence to the role of animals in predicting earthquakes. In 1975, Chinese authorities evacuated roughly a million people from the city of Haicheng in northeastern China ahead of a massive earthquake, in part based on the odd behavior of dozens of animals, including snakes that mysteriously emerged from hibernation despite freezing temperatures.
A later report by Chinese researchers noted strange animal behavior prior to the quake, including snakes "found frozen on the road...chickens refusing to enter the coop, pigs rooting at their fence, cows breaking their halters and escaping." The report also noted that "rats appeared to behave as though drunk," and police dogs "refused to obey commands."
The next year, after an earthquake in Tangshan killed hundreds of thousands, a United Nations report found that residents of one nearby county had managed to evacuate after they noticed nocturnal animals such as rats running around during the daytime.
In the wake of the recent quake, Chinese Web sites and newspapers are buzzing with new reports about strange animal behavior leading up to the disaster. One of the most unusual reports comes from Mianzhu, a southwestern city battered by the quake. Prior to the quake, thousands of toads flooded the city streets in an event so bizarre a local TV news team reported on it.
"Could this be a sign that a natural disaster is coming?" asked a Chinese newscaster on May 10th, two days before the quake struck. The video is posted on YouTube.
David Bickford, a toad expert at the National University of Singapore, described the footage as "very, very strange," but says it's likely a "freakish coincidence." He says toads sometimes travel en masse to breeding sites, or emerge in groups when large numbers of young are born at the same time. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that "frogs and toads communicate using sound, and some may be sensitive enough to detect vibrations in the earth."
In China, children have long been taught that animals act strangely before an earthquake: "Before an earthquake animals are portents," go the lyrics to a common children's song. "Cows, horses, mules and sheep won't enter their pens, pigs won't eat and dogs bark chaotically…..the snakes come out, rats stupidly run to find new homes…..fish suddenly leap out of the water."
But some Western scientists have also found links between animals and earthquakes. In 2001, Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia made an accidental discovery. As part of a study to determine whether seasonal depression affects dogs, Mr. Coren asked roughly 200 dog owners in the Vancouver area to monitor their dogs for signs of increased activity and anxiety over a 6 month period.
The study turned up no signs of seasonal depression in the pets. But Mr. Coren discovered one unusual spike in the data: on February 27th, 2001, 49% of the dogs in the study showed unusually high anxiety. The following day, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale struck a region neighboring Vancouver.
"They may have been responding to sounds of rocks scraping or breaking underground prior to the earthquake," says Mr. Coren, who studies animal hearing. (The deaf dogs in the study did not exhibit increased anxiety.)
Theories abound on why animals may have special quake-sensing abilities. One theory holds that snakes are exceptionally good at detecting vibrations since their survival depends on being able to sense tiny vibrations to detect rodents tens of meters a away in the pitch dark. As a result, they may respond to pre-tremors.
In his book "When the Snakes Awake," Helmut Tributsch, a professor of physical chemistry at the Free University of Berlin, says seismic activity ahead of earthquakes releases energy in the form of charged particles. He theorizes that animals -- particularly those that live underground -- can sense big temblors coming because of various vibrations and atmospheric patterns.
Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at Stanford University says there are number of ways animals may detect earthquakes, including electromagnetic signals prior to the earthquake. "You have a build-up in pressure between two electromagnetic plates and animals can detect that," says Ms. O'Connell-Rodwell. She says catfish in particular are sensitive to such changes, and that may explain why fishermen in China and Japan report seeing deep-sea fish come to the surface before an earthquake. She says animals may also be responding to vibrations and low-frequency sounds that are precursors to earthquakes.
Mr. Jiang, the Nanning researcher, says he had trouble getting high-level officials to take his snake-earthquake research seriously. And some experts say China has moved away from using animals to predict quakes in recent years. "Historically, the Chinese are the only people who take this seriously, but in recent years they've been playing it down in China because they don't want to be ridiculed by the West for being unscientific," says Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist.
That hasn't stopped Mr. Jiang, who says he is considering launching a new earthquake study involving turtles
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FINALMENTE... Finalmente descobrimos o motivo pelo qual ainda conseguimos aturar o Kurka...
...não é por altruísmo ou caridade, é sim, (ao bom espírito capitalista) porque esperamos que um dia, mesmo antes de uma grande catástrofe ocorrer, o Kurka começe a a agir estranhamente e a ter medo de tudo...
Esperem aí... o Kurka já age sempre desta forma!
Mesmo assim o Kurka não deixa de ser um grande animal!!!!
Grande abraço
