In 1975, agitated animals reportedly tipped off residents of the Chinese city of Haicheng of an impending earthquake, allowing them to flee. Now a Japanese veterinarian thinks it's time to look for earthquake-sensing genes among house pets that survived the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
Mitsuaki Ota, a professor of veterinary medicine at Azabu University near Tokyo, has collected blood samples from some 60 dogs and cats that were unusually restless or continuously mewing or barking in apparent anticipation of the 6.9 magnitude Kobe quake. He also has collected several hundred control samples from Kobe pets that were oblivious to the threat With some comparative genomics, he hopes to locate the genetic epicenter of the fidgety pets' precursory behavior. His first target: genes associated with the synthesis and reception of dopamine, a major neurotransmitter associated with behavioral problems.
"There is no doubt among many researchers that animals can exhibit strange behavior before certain natural phenomena, but the mechanism has not been discovered," says Ota, who has government grants totaling about $250,000 over 5 years. Unfortunately, he says, he can't try any selective breeding because "most of these pets were neutered." And he admits the project is a long shot "if we haven't made progress in 5 years, we may have to give up," he says.
Seismologist Robert Getter, an earthquake prediction skeptic at the-University of Tokyo, suggests he give it up now. Tales of anomalous animal behavior before quakes are "like UFO reports-entirely anecdotal stuff, with no controlled statistical tests of hypotheses," Geller says.