In Khao Lak, 50 miles north of Phuket along Thailand's western coast, a dozen elephants giving tourists rides began trumpeting hours before the Dec. 26 tsunami -about the time the 9.0-magnitude quake fractured the ocean floor. An hour before the wall of waves slammed the resort area, the elephants reportedly again grew agitated and began wailing. Just before disaster struck, they headed for higher ground - some breaking their chains to flee.

At the hard-hit Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, stunned wildlife officials reported that hundreds of elephants, leopards, tigers, wild boar, deer, water buffalo, monkeys and smaller mammals and reptiles had escaped unscathed.

Large turtles have been found dead in the debris along the Indonesian shore, but the tsunami's impact on wildlife was "limited," says Frank Momberg, who coordinates emergency response for a conservation group.

Tales of animals behaving strangely before the quake and of wildlife escaping to safety have abounded in the wake of the tsunami, raising anew questions about what these members of the animal kingdom knew that humans didn't -and what can be learned from it.

Seismologists have instruments that can measure quake factors during and after the fact, but experts admit no one can predict exactly when one will happen. Some scientists say certain animals have a kind of sensory hard-wiring that can detect earthquakes ahead of time, which one day might be replicated in man-made instruments.

Reports of animals'"sixth sense"in detecting natural disasters go back centuries. But science is iffy on a subject that, for obvious reasons, is difficult to replicate in a laboratory. Nevertheless, some scientists are looking for explanations of why some species behave strangely before natural catastrophes, by correlating the animals' sensory abilities with microscopic and invisible sensory stimuli.

"I don't know if I'd call this a sixth sense so much as a better sense," says Ken Grant, of the Humane Society in Bali, Indonesia. "Most animals know that when the ground starts to shake, something is wrong."

Animals' sensory physiology - super-sensitive to sound, temperature, touch, vibration, electrostatic and chemical activity and magnetic fields - gives them a head start in the days and hours before natural calamities.

"It appears a lot of animals have sensory organs that detect these micro-tremors and micro-changes that we cannot possibly monitor," says George Pararas-Carayannis, a former University of Hawaii oceanographer and geophysicist who leads the Tsunami Society.

"It's a sensitivity that we humans don't have. But animals through millions of years of evolution have developed it, and that's how they have been able to survive as a species. It is run or perish," says Pararas-Carayannis, author of the 2001 book The Big One: The Next Great California Earthquake - Why, Where, and When It Will Happen.

Why not humans? When an imminent disaster so unimaginably primal as this occurs, can only creatures in tune with nature at its most elemental sense it coming?

Research shows that many fish are sensitive to low-frequency vibrations and detect tremors long before humans. The bullhead catfish detects magnitude-2 earthquakes so weak people can't feel them at the top of 10-story buildings, says John Caprio, a biological sciences professor at Louisiana State University specializing in fish senses.

Other animals are also extremely sensitive to ground vibrations. Lynette Hart, professor of animal behavior at the University of California-Davis, says that's what probably cued the elephants, which most likely felt the quake in their feet and trunks. Elephants, she says, are known to "lay their trunks on the ground when an airplane or truck generates large seismic noise," as if to feel it.

With the elephant's intelligence - its brain is the largest of terrestrial creatures -"they can figure out what direction the stimulus is coming from, how strong it is, and what evasive action to take," Hart says.

Some animals may have heard the tsunami coming from the moment the quake erupted under the ocean. Species of birds, dogs, elephants, tigers and other animals can detect "infrasound"- frequencies in the range of 1-3 hertz, compared with humans' 100-200-hertz range, says psychobiologist James Walker, director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University. "It's sensitivity to such a low frequency range that most people wouldn't call it sound anymore."

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