If this toads/earthquakes study in the Journal of Zoology becomes available to us soon enough, I think we will use it in class.Here are some excerpts from a BBC news article:
Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes.For us, the latter two paragraphs give us a reason for considering this paper: electromagnetism and thermodynamics of Earth. Nice.
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...
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.
