Hi Michael,

First I want to say that this isn't my site. It was put together by Canie who saw the need for it and who has done such a great job with getting it up and running and Joan providing a lot of help and feedback (hope I didn't miss anyone).

Based on my experience, ants indicate quakes when coming indoors. Thats not to say that when they start showing up someplace outside doesn't indicate a quake though. My first experience with the ants was with Northridge where beginning in the last week of December they were swarming into our kitchen during the night. Every morning I would kill them all and we would plug wherever it was they were coming from. The next night they'd come from somewhere else. This kept on until the 15th of January and disappeared altogether. And this is in the middle of winter (for those that talk about the heat being the ant factor). Our 2nd experience was before the Ridgecrest quakes in late '95 and '96 where they came in the thousands to raid some chips we had left upstairs in our bonus room. The line of ants was about 40ft long and about an inch and a half wide. Thousands of them. We've had several other occurrences as well prior to other smaller quakes including 3 different occurrences (upstairs) prior to the Lavic Lake quake.

My theory on these ants (for which I wish I could get ahold of some data), is that the areas that will feel the most ground shaking from the coming quake is where the ants will be the most bothersome. They know its coming and are trying to get away from whatever it is affecting them (remember the Caltech professor and bees and electromagnetic energy?) and/or are stocking up on food as well.

With our dog, he gets extremely excited prior to quakes. Like he has boundless energy. He's a shizou that is only a little over a foot tall when standing on his hind legs. When getting this way, he'll jump up on me darn near jumping up into my arms. He was like this last friday night after we got back from the football game and stayed like that till I went to bed. But you have to be carefull and pay attention to how he reacts in certain situations. He'll be like that when I first get home from somewhere and will calm down after awhile. Maybe he's hungry and out of food. So its really a matter of being sure that all the other known possibilities are eliminated prior to saying, yup --- we've got a quake coming. I think also that cranial size may have something to do with how differently different kinds of animals will react given the same situation. Some will notice while others won't.

Hope this helps,
Dennis