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emmet with the Earth ’s bad taste in existent estate seem to smell quake before they strike , harmonize to inquiry present today ( April 11 ) at the European Geosciences Union annual meeting in Vienna .
fighting faults , fractures where the Earth violently ruptures in earthquakes , are the prefer housing situation for flushed Sir Henry Wood ants in Germany . Researcher Gabriele Berberich of the University Duisburg - Essen in Germany has consider more than 15,000 red Ellen Price Wood ant mounds lined up along Germany ’s fault , like candy drops on a conveyor knock .
Red wood ant mounds on an earthquake fault in Germany.
For three years , Berberich and her workfellow tracked the ant 24 - 7 with picture cameras , using limited software to catalogue behavioral changes . There were 10earthquakesbetween magnitude 2.0 and 3.2 during the discipline period , 2009 to 2012 , and many smaller temblors . The emmet only changed conduct for temblor larger than order of magnitude 2.0 , which also happens to be the smallest quakes that humans can sense .
During the day , ants busily run about their day-by-day activeness , and at night the colony rest inside the mound , mirroring human diurnal figure , Berberich said at a news program conference today . But before an earthquake , the pismire were alive throughout the Nox , outside their mound , vulnerable to marauder , the researchers found . Normalant behaviordidn’t survey until a day after the earthquake , Berberich said .
So how do ants know an earthquake is add up ? Berberich mistrust the insects cull up changing gaseous state emission or local shift in the Earth ’s magnetized field .
Red wood ant mounds on an earthquake fault in Germany.
" Red woodwind pismire have chemoreceptors for carbon dioxide gradients and magnetoreceptors for electromagnetic fields , " she said . " We ’re not indisputable why or how they respond to the possible input , but we ’re plan on going to a more tectonically participating neighborhood and see if ants respond to larger earthquakes , " Berberich total .
