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...middle of the night. The 6.3-magnitude quake was the deadliest to hit Italy in nearly 30 years, killing roughly 300 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless. The medieval city of L'Aquila, which lay near the epicenter, was devastated. Villages nearby were also reduced to ruins. Grant, sleeping in a country home 45 miles (about 70 km) away, awoke to the walls of her room shaking. "Things were falling down, cracking. Everything was rattling," she recalls. The next day, her adviser, a professor of biology at Oxford University named Tim Halliday, e-mailed to make sure she hadn...
...strokes of luck from which science is made. The seismic shift continued to set off aftershocks almost every day, but Grant stayed to count her toads. When a full moon rose three days after the quake, a few toads risked a return. But then their numbers dropped again, remaining low until two days after the last major aftershock - a full 10 days after the first tremor. "It's never been reported to have happened before," says Grant. "Once they're breeding, then they're breeding. That...
...clear what caused the toads to scatter. Grant, whose research was published this week in the Journal of Zoology, says the toads could have reacted to changes in the earth's magnetic field, alterations in the ionosphere or spikes in the amount of radon gas in the water. "Toads are very sensitive to their environment," she says. Now that at least one potential connection has been drawn between toads and earthquakes, she says, scientists could look for similar reactions in other toad populations that live in seismic areas and are being monitored by conservationists. She suggests exploring how toads respond...
...There are many anecdotal accounts of animals acting strangely before tremors, but there's little hard science. "This is the first study that monitors unusual behavior in animals for a significant period before and after a major earthquake," Grant says. In the 1st century, the Greek historian Diodorus recounted how rats, centipedes and snakes escaped from the city of Helice in 373 B.C. a few days before an earthquake dropped it into the Corinthian Gulf. After an earthquake struck China's Sichuan province in 2008, killing 68,000 people, residents in the city of Mianzhu said they had seen...
...Some seismologists have doubts about Grant's research, saying the toads' behavior could have just been a fluke. After all, critics say, the L'Aquila earthquake was preceded by minor shocks that also worried the city's residents. "If there was a fright among the toads, it would have been a reflection of the fright that was happening among the people," says Pascal Bernard, a seismologist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris. "People were afraid, but nobody knew for certain that something was going to happen...