In an Indian village, a change in the behaviour of ants can mean more than it appears to.

Before heavy rain, people have long watched ants carry eggs and larvae towards higher, drier ground. Frogs become louder. Birds alter their movement. Snakes sometimes leave their hiding places. 

Such observations have travelled through generations as folklore.

But there is a scientific question underneath them: are animals actually sensing changes before humans can?

The answer is more interesting than the idea of a “sixth sense”.

Animals do not predict earthquakes, cyclones or floods in the human sense. Instead, their bodies can detect physical signals that people cannot easily hear, feel or see, from vibrations travelling through the ground to changes in atmospheric pressure.

And that could explain why animals sometimes appear to move before disaster arrives.

Across many parts of India, ants are among the animals people closely observe before heavy rain. Their movement has been incorporated into traditional environmental knowledge in several communities.

The ants themselves do not know that a storm is coming.

Their colonies, however, are buried in the environment.

Changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature and water levels can alter conditions inside and around a nest. Moving eggs or larvae to safer ground may therefore be a response to environmental change rather than an act of prediction.

The earthquake question

The idea becomes more striking when the disaster is an earthquake.

For centuries, people have reported dogs barking, snakes emerging, birds taking flight and livestock becoming restless before earthquakes. India has its own body of stories around unusual animal behaviour, particularly across the seismically active Himalayas and Northeast.

There is a possible biological explanation.

An earthquake does not send just one kind of wave through........

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