Glen,

Physicists in Japan think the animals are sensing ULF (as you say, piezo or whatever) and therefore it is better to use equipment for direct study, rather than indirectly watching animals. I do not agree. Of course the latter method has been cut off from funding too, so now neither approach is used. So in a sense, Chris (and John) are right that "no one is interested." No one of importance, anyway.

Mainly my thinking differs from you somewhat in that I do not believe earthquakes should be the only focus. The shuttle carries many experiments into space. A program of monitoring animals should be designed more generally. Here in Japan this would help politically too and if it were me making a proposal, I would never even mention earthquakes in it, which would be the kiss of death, so to speak.

In the zoo example, I have seen simultaneous reactions among animals, especially primates, that are not explainable without some kind of signal, because of the distance between them. I assume that monitoring metabolism would reveal some elements that simultaneously change.

However, that an earthquake did not occur soon thereafter is irrelevant to understanding how an unknown stimulus made them react. Yet when visitors see such a thing, they inevitably mutter to each other that an earthquake might happen soon.

To use an example from the wild, last year Oct 31 were huge levels of ULF. Just as several hours of this was subsiding, a wild boar was found swimming in the ocean far from its habitat (most likely Kobe City). It would have been useful to have had such an animal tagged, so that you could know where it became disoriented, and what path it took. You could also know if others in that area became disoriented (very likely) and where they went. No large earthquake followed soon afterwards, but these questions are still valuable to answer. But the result was typical for Japan: the boar became unruly when they tried to fish it from the ocean, so they shot it dead. If they were more careful and took trouble, they could have at least returned it to Kobe and observed it. But that was not their responsibility.

For the numerous anomalous bear events Sept-Oct 2004, such tagging would have shown whether or not food shortage (the prime speculation) was a factor. In this case, a very rough estimation based on the daily TV news incidents, suggested that the center of disoriented behavior was Toyama. That area was hit by a large quake Oct 23. Even so, there is no animal behavior data to be studied. Also, the several ULF monitoring stations in the area had been abandoned a couple of years before. So of course there can be nothing conclusive. And thus of course "no one is interested."

The most recent example is Tokyo (another quake today), where there have been many reports (last two months) of unexplained radio interference, including airport radar systems, televisions, etc. There was a single bear incident in a zoo as well, but the point is no one is making observations so it is unknown whether that incident is isolated or appears so, reported only because a man died.