Hi Cal,

I may as well acknowledge up front that I'm another one of those annoying "anecdotes are not evidence" types.

To quote the blogger Orac, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.' "

That being said, I'm curious about the source of your anecdote about whale beachings before the Loma Prieta quake. I could find no other mention of it on the web, which, given all that was written about the quake and what would have been the relative drama of multiple whale beachings surprises me. Even Joseph Kirschvink's paper, Earthquake Prediction by Animals: Evolution and Sensory Perception, from the April 2000 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, which references the Loma Prieta quake in detail, as well as discussing cetacean stranding events at magnetic anomalies along coastlines, makes no mention of any associated beaching.

Is there an independent source for this? Thanks.

marco