Why Did the Animals Survive?

A fascinating article in Slate asks why animals in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the other tsunami countries survived in significantly greater numbers than the humans. Although some animals died, most of them did not; in Yala, a national park in Sri Lanka, none of the wildlife was found dead at all, although people in that area perished in huge numbers. Animal behavior experts Dr. Alfred A. Bedard, Jr. and Dr. Peggy Hill say that the many stories of animals sensing danger long before humans do has a strong basis in fact. Many animals can hear infrasound -- sound waves at very low frequencies -- that major natural events like earthquakes generate. Human beings cannot hear infrasound. Powerful ground vibrations, which would have reached land hours before the tsunami hit, can be felt by animals. Some can feel the vibrations in their bodies; others can feel them by putting their ears to the ground. These early warning signals would have sent most animals running for higher ground.

Human beings have the ability to pick up this kind of information through their senses, too. Although we cannot hear infrasonic sound waves, we can "feel" them, or sense them; and special sensors in our joints, called "pacinian corpuscles," can alert us to the presence of ground vibrations. The big BUT is that although we possess the ability, we don't know how to use it. We don't know what the information our senses are giving us means. We ignore it, or we misinterpret it. Ironically, human beings may, in some situations, be disadvantaged by our higher intelligence. Animals must rely on instinct to survive; but humans may be too smart for their own good.