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March 15th 2010
by badfaith, Kent, United Kingdom, Since: March 9th 2010, Brain-fu: 18970
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I have become interested in earthworms recently, but I cannot find out anything about how they behave in an earhtquake situation... Isuppose it is hard to track them under the earth, as they can't be tagged!
It seems to me that a creature that has evolved underground and spends it's life surrounded on all sides by the earth, and for whom a shift of the weight of earth above it might be perilous, may have developed a sensitivity to earth tremmors, which could be observed in their collective behaviour in these situations.
Do they head for higher ground when earthquakes happen?
Given the quantity of worms in any given particular block of soil, I imagine their normal behaviour collectively would be chaotic and random, with no observable pattern... but if an event which would threaten them all occured, they would universally adopt a survival behaviour pattern, and uniformally change direction say, and move to safety.
If you could track this behaviour, perhaps monitor it for patterns, maybe in an ant farm style panel that was in contact with the earth so any tremmors were communicated through the soil, whenever their behaviour adopted this characteristic, you'd know something was wrong.
Could this be a cheap detection system for local people in earthquake prone regions?
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