Chang Ai-Lien, Straits Times 15 May 08;
FROM frogs to pet dogs, animals have super-senses capable of surpassing even the most sensitive disaster-monitoring devices.
But how they do this is little understood.
Stories abound of animals sensing and fleeing catastrophic events ranging from typhoons to thunderstorms.
In Sri Lanka's Yala National Park, for example, the 2004 tsunami killed scores of tourists, but wildlife like elephants, wild boar and deer survived because they had moved inland before the killer waves hit.
And on May 10, two days before the Sichuan quake, the Chinese media reported thousands of migrating toads on the streets of Manzhu, about 60km south-east of the areas worst hit by the quake.
Whether the amphibians were reacting to the faintest early tremors that went unnoticed by earthquake sensors is unclear.
They may merely have been moving between their feeding and mating grounds, said frog expert David Bickford from the National University of Singapore.
Nonetheless, animals can surpass even the most sophisticated detection devices - their abilities range from sensing vibrations to sensing electromagnetic and pressure changes before quakes, storms or cyclones.
In the case of earthquakes, for example, frogs are highly attuned to vibrations.
'An earthquake sensor buried deep within the ground would probably get less information than a frog sitting on a rock,' said Dr Bickford, who is with the university's Department of Biological Sciences.
But using a caged animal as a warning device would probably fail, he added, since having it in captivity would alter its natural behaviour.
Animal senses span far beyond what humans are capable of, or can even imagine, yet the field is little studied, said Dr Peter Ng, head of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research.
'We think we can use machines to solve everything, but sometimes we can learn a lot more from nature,' he said.
