Wearable device could aid dogs in helping to predict earthquakes, but more research needed, critics say

Can dogs help predict when earthquakes occur?

The company behind the PetPace biometric collar says the health data it tracks may also have the capability of forecasting earthquakes.

A dog's pulse, heart rate variability, temperature, respiration and activity are recorded and sent to the PetPace cloud in real-time, according to Asaf Dagan, chief scientist and cofounder of PetPace, the parent company of Animal Alerts, told ABC News. An AI algorithm then determines the dog’s overall stress level.

"The idea is that if we can track the behavior and the anxiety levels of animals ... then we use AI and machine learning advanced models to correlate that with geophysical data like earthquakes of different magnitudes," Dagan said.

There is currently no conclusive evidence, however, to show that dogs can accurately predict tremors.

Earthquake geologist Wendy Bohon expressed skepticism that a smart collar for dogs could aid in predicting earthquakes.

"I have never seen a convincing study that shows that animals can predict earthquakes, or that animals know that an earthquake is going to happen before it happens," Bohon told ABC News, adding that earthquakes are difficult to predict.

The earliest-ever reference to unusual animal behavior prior to a significant earthquake occurred in 373 BC in Greece, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Varying species -- such as rats, weasels, snakes and centipedes -- reportedly left their homes and headed for safety several days before a destructive earthquake struck the region, according to the USGS.

A 2012 paper found that 49% of dogs showed a significant increase in anxiety the day before a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest in February 2001. The dogs may have picked up on foreshocks, the smaller earthquakes that occur before a larger one, or acoustic waves generated by the movement of the tectonic plates.

"Sometimes animals might feel the arrival of the waves from far away that are too small for us to feel," Bohon said. "And so we don't notice those first small waves arriving ... it may seem like the animals are predicting the earthquake, when in reality they're reacting to the first arrivals of the waves that we're just not tuned into."

These primary, or "P" waves, travel at a rate of several miles per second from the epicenter, which could make them more noticeable to animals, according to the USGS.

Very few humans notice the smaller "P" waves, which arrive before the larger "S" waves, the USGS said.

Other historical anecdotal evidence points to fish, birds, reptiles and insects exhibiting strange behavior anywhere from weeks to seconds before an earthquake, the USGS said. Cats, elephants and toads have also been observed to exhibit behavior changes before a seismic event, according to the American Kennel Club.

Evidence in recent decades has largely been anecdotal, according to a 2018 paper published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America that examined 180 previous studies.

Researchers from Germany filmed red wood ants that nest along a fault line in the Neuwied Basin, a seismically active region in Eifel, Germany. They studied the ants’ behavior hours before the earthquake. The scientists found that the ants' nocturnal rest phase and daily activity was suppressed ahead of seismic activity, and their standard daily routine did not resume until the next day.

In a 2020 study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany wrote that they precisely measured an increase in activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity.

The scientists measured the activity of multiple cows, dogs and sheep at a farm near the epicenter of the 6.6 magnitude earthquake that struck near the Norcia Basin in central Italy in October 2016. They found strong reactions among the animals before a magnitude 3.8 or greater earthquake when they were housed together in a stable, according to the study. Prior to the earthquake, the animals were outfitted with biologgers and GPS sensors, highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements in any direction.

The farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, according to the study. They reacted earlier when they were closer to the origin, the researchers said.

Dogs are uniquely suited to behavioral response observation. They can smell odors and hear high-pitched noises undetectable to humans, giving them the ability to sense things outside human perception, according to the American Kennel Club.

"Dogs are particularly useful models of this phenomenon due to their acute senses and their close proximity to humans," Rachell Grant, behavioral ecologist at London South Bank University and lead for the Animal Alert project, said in a statement.

The idea that observational data could be used to predict an oncoming earthquake has been touted in the past. Researchers in 2018 proposed that crowdsourcing and social media might help to predict earthquakes and developed a prototype for social media users to upload posts about abnormal animal behavior.

Social media users claimed that animals behaved strangely in the hours before a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey in February 2023, killing more more than 21,000 people. The behavior reported included birds flying erratically and dogs howling loudly, The Washington Post reported.

In 2015, researchers noticed changes in animal behavior three weeks before a 7.0 magnitude quake in an Amazon region of Peru in 2011, a study published in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth found.

PetPace, maker of the biometric dog collar, is conducting a study in Lima, Peru, which experiences 90% of all seismic activity around the world due to its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. If all of the dogs in the study respond in the same timeframe, the algorithm can likely identify a pattern that an earthquake may be on its way, Dagan said. Dogs in a region with little seismic activity will also be monitored as a control group.

Scientists want as much data as they can get, and this approach could increase the sample size of animal behavior prior to an earthquake that have already been studied, Bohon said.

"We want all the data and information that we can get, so that we can explore every possibility," she said. "But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."