Do Grizzly bears like Pink Floyd? (European Space Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Disclaimer: While this article is enclosed in a zoo of facts, please be aware that satire has escaped its enclosure and is running rampant.
For hundreds of years, we’ve known that animals can sense oncoming disasters—like earthquakes, tsunamis, and approaching postal workers who are just doing their jobs—well in advance of the humans around them, and sometimes even before official monitoring systems. Elephants, buffalo, and flamingoes fled to higher ground before Thailand’s 2004 tsunamis. Snakes, in particular, are incredibly sensitive to earthquakes, a surprise to anyone with exes in Los Angeles.
More happens in an eclipse than a temporary twilight: The temperature drops, and air pressure is likely to change, too. However, research is scarce about how animals react since, on average, an eclipse only happens in one geographical location once every 375 years.
During an eclipse back in 2012, reporters staked out the Japan Monkey Centre in central Aichi prefecture to observe the chimpanzees, who… didn’t appear to notice anything at all, and continued normally eating, napping and throwing poop at one another. Chimps: They’re Just Like Us!
However, their fellow inmates, the lemurs, a few enclosures down, were acting strange. According to keepers, the resident gang of 20 ring-tailed primates skipped breakfast and began to jump between the poles and trees in their enclosure (a behavior they usually only do before bed).
I feel like I'm tripping balls, Neil! (Neil Crosby/Flickr)
Once the eclipse had passed, the lemurs returned to the ground like nothing had happened and resumed lying around in the sun, eating, napping, and contemplating their place in the cosmos.
Wow, Jared, that was intense. (Keven Law/Wikimedia Commons)
But in one 2017 study at the Riverbanks Zoo in South Carolina, Doctor Adam “Doolizzle-dizzle” Hartstone-Rose and colleagues looked at 17 different species, including three primates, six birds, and grizzly bears (not to mention giraffes, elephants, Komodo dragons, and a partridge in a pear tree).
They observed that three-quarters of the animals acted differently during the eclipse, with behaviors in three categories: anxiety (pacing, aggression, doom-scrolling), evening (lining up in front of their night enclosures, playing smooth jazz, starting skincare routines), and new behaviors (looking up at the sky, making weird noises… okay, basically the Galapagos tortoises got some molly and had an orgy).
Do they have to be so in-your-face about it? (jpellgen/Flickr)
Doolizzle-dizzle is leading a new effort to recruit animal observers during Monday’s eclipse. If you’re in the path of totality, the zoos and animal parks near you may also want your help monitoring their residents’ reactions. If work won’t give you time off, quit. It’s for science!
And, ideally, pandas. (Public Domain/Rawpixel)
