On 8 April, while most people in the US will be gazing skyward (hopefully with the correct protective eyewear), animals won’t have a clue what’s going on.
It makes sense, right? For animals, the Sun structures their whole life. Without energy drinks and late-night TV to throw their sleep schedule off course, the Sun is an animal’s all-in-one alarm clock, sleeping pill and calendar.
In 2017, a team of researchers set about studying how different animals responded to the total solar eclipse in the US.
“Basically everything that you've ever heard about animal behaviour during an eclipse could reasonably be regarded as anecdotal from a scientific perspective,” Prof Adam Hartstone-Rose, who led the research, tells BBC Science Focus.
Hartstone-Rose and his team observed the behaviour of 17 species at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina – the first time such a study had been carried out. What did they find? Well, how animals behave during a total solar eclipse differs dramatically, from not bothered at all to downright weird…
The strange ways animals might respond to the eclipse
According to Hartstone-Rose, animals responded to the celestial event in one of four ways: no reaction whatsoever, starting their nighttime routine, exhibiting anxiety and exhibiting novel behaviours.
“Most animals fell into a category that we refer to as relating to circadian rhythm. So basically, animals treat the eclipse as if it were evening, then night, and then morning, and so go into those routines,” he says.
Similar nighttime routines have been widely reported for other solar eclipses. Expect birds to go quiet and crickets and cicadas to liven up as the Moon sweeps in front of the Sun.
The next biggest category of behaviours was, somewhat sadly, those related to anxiety. The evidence collected by Hartstone-Rose and the team, for example, suggests you should steer well clear of giraffes should you find yourself in their vicinity during an eclipse.
“During the peak of the eclipse, the giraffes started running around like crazy and in a potentially dangerous way,” Hartstone-Rose explains.
“In the wild, giraffes are pretty calm animals; they’re kind of gangly and delicate. They really don’t do crazy behaviour unless they need to, and so the only time I've ever seen giraffes running around is if they're startled by a predator or maybe a vehicle or something like that.”
Thankfully, any anxious behaviour was short-lived. “The good news is that all of the animal behaviour returns to normality very rapidly, like literally within minutes.”
But what about these so-called ‘novel’ behaviours? This is where stuff gets weird.
Siamangs are a species of gibbon native to the forests of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. They’re kind of cute but really noisy and are known for having throat sacks that can swell as big as their heads to help them sing.
During the eclipse, and in the days before and after, the team recorded the singing siamangs and found that they made a unique sound during totality. One they hadn’t heard before.
“We were able to statistically show that the vocalisations during the eclipse were significantly different than any other time we had ever been able to record their vocalisation,” Hartstone-Rose says. “That was pretty remarkable.”
Read more:
- How far apart are the Sun, Moon and Earth during eclipses?
- How a solar eclipse revealed the warping of spacetime and opened a new window into the Universe
- Solar eclipse: 13 stunning photos of the blazing ‘ring of fire’
The prize for the strangest eclipse behaviour goes to… giant tortoises?
If anxious running and strange songs weren’t weird enough, then the Galapagos tortoises at Riverbanks Zoo took eclipse reactions to a different level.
“Galapagos tortoises are not charismatic animals,” Hartstone-Rose says. “They’re like funny-looking boulders that live to well over 100 years old.”
As the stereotype goes, they don’t move particularly quickly, and the males can weigh more than 227 kilograms, making them the largest tortoise species on the planet.
As the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon in 2017, the Galapagos tortoises began doing something unexpected: “They started mating behaviour. They literally started breeding in front of our eyes.”
So eclipses might get tortoises in the mood; who knew?
How you can get involved this time around
After the surprising findings from 2017, researchers want to go bigger and better this year.
Hartstone-Rose and a team of researchers plan to observe animal behaviour at Fort Worth Zoo, Texas. They’ll be observing some of the same species as in 2017 and some new ones to make comparisons.
But you don’t need to be a trained researcher to help scientists understand animal behaviour during this once-in-a-lifetime event.
“The really exciting research that we're doing is a participatory science study called the Solar Eclipse Safari Project,” says Hartstone-Rose.
If you want to get involved, simply pick any animal you’d like to observe, be that your dog, cat, a farm animal or an animal in nature.
You don’t need to be in the path of totality either. All of the US will experience at least a partial eclipse on 8 April, and researchers want to know if the extent of an eclipse has an impact on behaviour.
And before you worry about missing the eclipse itself because you’re too busy seeing if your dog scratches its ear or not, fear not; data collection should only take a couple of seconds every few minutes, so you still have time to soak it all in.
Why study animals during eclipses?
To some people, understanding how different animals behave during eclipses may seem like an interesting, but ultimately pointless endeavour. Fair point. Although there is some method to the madness.
Firstly, Hartstone-Rose points out that understanding the animals that exhibit anxiety is important.
“If an eclipse is upsetting, or if the human reaction to an eclipse is upsetting, then that's important information for us to know. For example, if giraffes really do run around during eclipses, it might be the ethical thing to move the giraffe indoors during the next eclipse.
“After all, we don't want them to hurt themselves.”
More poignantly, he thinks it allows us to answer some of the big questions about our relationships with animals.
“One of those big questions, and anybody who owns a pet dog or cat knows this, is what is going through my animal's head. You know? What is my dog thinking at any given moment? People have that question not just about dogs but about all of their favourite animals.”
Perhaps understanding how animals respond to one of the most unique and mesmerising experiences on the planet will take us a step closer to solving that mystery.
About our expert
Adam Hartstone-Rose is a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University. His research typically focuses on anatomical adaptation in live animals (e.g., feeding experiments), examination of muscles (e.g., the muscles of mastication), and analysis of bones and teeth. In 2017, he led a study into animal behaviour during a total solar eclipse at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, South Carolina.
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