Paying Attention

"...many wild animals are paying close attention to nature while humans are doing whatever it is that humans do."

National Zoo animals may have been paying good attention to nature when they showed signs of alarm prior to the recent earthquake.

"In the most famous case of modern times, snakes and frogs emerged from their holes in 1975 in the dead of winter several weeks before a magnitude-7.3 earthquake in Haicheng, China (the odd animal behavior helped persuade officials to evacuate the city just before the tremor)."

"...the simplest explanation for what happened at the zoo on Tuesday involves what scientists call the P wave.

An earthquake generates two types of seismic waves. The first is the relatively weak, fast-moving P wave, or primary wave. Then comes the more powerful S wave, or secondary wave, which lumbers along at a leisurely pace and heaves the ground up and down."