• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Do Elephants React To An Earthquake? Watch And Find Out

April 21, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Last week, as is its wont, Southern California experienced an earthquake. Rated a magnitude 5.2 by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the quake was strong enough to unnerve, but not so bad as to result in much damage. But that didn’t stop one particular group of residents from mounting an emergency defense. 

“Elephants have the ability to feel sound through their feet,” explains Mindy Albright, curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. “But we can’t say for sure that they knew the earthquake was coming. From the footage, it looks like they would have reacted around the same time humans did.” 

But rather than “drop, cover, and hold on”, the elephants at San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California, were caught on camera forming an “alert circle” – an “instinctive behavior” in which the adults in the herd “join together and circle the calves, facing outward to confront any potential predators,” Albright tells IFLScience. 

“The herd’s instinct is to protect their youngest and the herd as a whole,” she says. “Times like these, you can see the teamwork and the trust they have in each other.”



As the ground starts to shake, we see Ndlula, Umngani, and Khos – the three adults of the herd – scan the area and rush toward Zuli and Mkhaya, the two 7-year-old sibling calves. It’s not too different from how elephants live in the wild, where herds comprise sisters, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers, all led by a matriarch elephant: “She is usually the oldest and most experienced female in the group,” Albright explains. “The matriarch guides the herd, remembering where and how to find food and water, how to avoid predators, and the best places for shelter.” 

“Elephants have a complex social structure,” she tells IFLScience. “Each elephant in the herd has their place in the hierarchy and continues to navigate important social nuances.”

The Escondido herd isn’t quite the same – the three adults are unrelated, making this more of a “found family” than a natural grouping. But they are nevertheless “a cohesive herd,” Albright says, “and [they] count on each other to keep their young safe.”

Just like the human residents of the area, the elephants recovered from the quake pretty quickly. “The elephant herd went back to foraging for food in less than four minutes, though they stayed close together,” Albright tells IFLScience. 

“When an aftershock came shortly after, they formed an alert circle once more but dispersed even quicker,” she adds. “They had learned that there was no threat associated with the rumbling.” 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Russia moves Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets to Belarus to patrol borders, Minsk says
  2. French senators to visit Taiwan amid soaring China tensions
  3. Thought Unicorns Don’t Exist? Turns Out They Live In A Chinese Cave
  4. Oldest Ever Record Of A Solar Eclipse Discovered Pretty Much In Front Of Our Faces

Source Link: How Do Elephants React To An Earthquake? Watch And Find Out

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version