Total Solar Eclipse May Confuse, Silence And Cause Animals To Go Wild

No one knows exactly what animals will do during the total eclipse of the sun on Monday, Aug. 21, but anecdotal, if not empirical evidence, suggests the eclipse throws the animal kingdom for a bit of a loop. For example, about an hour before the sun fell under the moon’s shadow in Serbia in 1999, agitated horses pawed anxiously at the ground and began sweating. But once the sky darkened, they calmed, and some even lay down.

That’s according to a paper published in 2004 in the Turkish Journal of Veterinary Medicine & Animal Sciences. Other scientific journals contain accounts of similar phenomena, and on Monday, scientists will be watching closely to see how animals react.

Will noisy birds fall silent and gulls, terns, pelicans, cormorants and frigate birds stop flying? That happened in February 1988 when University of Toledo biology professor Elliot Tramer was in Venezuela for a total solar eclipse.

“As the eclipse approached and it began to get a dusk-like lighting, the sun was probably 70 to 80 percent occluded, these birds all got up and flew inland,” Tramer told the Kansas City Star. “The local people in Spanish were all saying, ‘The birds think it’s evening!’ ”

In general, getting their days and nights mixed up seemed to be the common thread in scientific studies. In Serbia, dogs went into their doghouses and a rooster crowed for about 10 minutes before totality, but pigeons turned “aggressive,” according to the study.

About two days before an annular eclipse in 1984, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta began studying the effect of an eclipse on chimpanzee behavior.

“When the sky began to darken and the temperature began to decrease, solitary females and females with infants moved to the top of the climbing structure,” researchers Jane E. Branch and Deborah A. Gust wrote in a paper published in the American Journal of Primatology in 1986. “As the eclipse progressed, additional chimpanzees began to congregate on the climbing structure to orient their bodies in the direction of the sun and the moon.”

Researchers have also noted that hippopotamus at Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe were crossing the water to their usual evening retirement spot when the moon darkened the sun in a June 2001 total eclipse, but they hadn’t made it to the far bank when sunlight returned. The hippos seemed apprehensive and confused for the rest of the day.

In the Middle Ages, eclipses were said to terrify animals. In one of the earliest known accounts of animal behavior during eclipses, Italian monk Ristoro d’Arezzo wrote that during a total eclipse on June 3, 1239, “all the animals and birds were terrified; and the wild beasts could easily be caught,” according to National Geographic.

Astronomer Christoph Clavius noted that an eclipse in Portugal on Aug. 21, 1560, was “marvelous to behold,” but “the birds fell down from the sky to the ground in terror of such horrid darkness.”

Scientists in the path of totality in Monday’s eclipse will be watching animals to glean behavioral changes to expand on a slim body of research that currently exists. Adam Hartstone-Rose, an adjunct professor at the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, South Carolina, lamented to CNN “there are many more scientific papers about Sasquatch than about animal behavior during an eclipse.”

Zoos in Tennessee, which is in the path of totality, are asking members of the public to record on social media and other places what animals are doing when the sun goes behind the moon. The Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga is planning to watch its lemurs closely because they have been known to “behave oddly during these events,” according to a news release, and the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago will watch its chimpanzees during the eclipse.

The University of Missouri’s South Farm Research Center falls in the path of totality, and researches will be training cameras on horses to see if they become frisky because they think it’s dinner time, Tim Reinbott, director of field operations, told Harvest Public Media. The farm plans to monitor its chicken coops, too.

“I think they’ll be real reactive to (the eclipse),” Reinbott said. “But then again it’s cool. So they may say, ‘you know, maybe I need to stay out here and eat some more?’ I don’t know.”

MU researchers are also monitoring beehives to determine if buzzing increases during the eclipse, as some other studies have suggested.

Reinbott said the studies might not be groundbreaking today but could be useful later on.

“What we learn here, we may not even be able to fathom what could be used years from now,” he told Harvest Public Media.

AP Photo/Richard Vogel