When a total solar eclipse transforms day into night on April 8, researchers will be standing by to observe how animals’ routines at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas are disrupted.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 While most people will be looking up at the sun during the April 8th total eclipse,
00:05 researchers at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas will be looking at the animals.
00:09 Animal behavior is only actually a small part of the research we do.
00:12 Mostly we study skulls and we do dissections of animals.
00:16 Adam Hartstone-Rose is following up on studies done at a South Carolina zoo
00:21 that was in the path of total darkness in 2017.
00:24 There was just this amazing opportunity where we were in 2017 to see these animals,
00:30 interesting animals, and in this interesting phenomenon that was about to happen.
00:35 And so we put together a study during that and I think I basically became hooked.
00:41 There is lots of anecdotal evidence of animals behaving bizarrely during eclipses,
00:45 but more rigorous scientific study is newer.
00:48 One of the animals we watched was the Komodo dragon, which are magnificent.
00:52 They're the biggest lizard. They're amazing. They're a little bit scary, but they don't do anything.
00:57 Like in general, a Komodo dragon sits still for almost all hours of the day
01:01 and absorbs the sun and maybe is digesting.
01:05 The Komodo dragon we were watching before the 2017 eclipse, it literally didn't move at all.
01:10 We watched it all day Saturday. We watched it all day Sunday.
01:14 Then the eclipse was on Monday and just in those couple minutes during the eclipse,
01:19 it started running around and had a reaction.
01:21 Some of the animals behaved as if evening had come, so they went into their nighttime routine.
01:28 The gorillas, they spend their day outside and then at night they're moved into like an indoor enclosure
01:35 where they get their final food and then they go to sleep.
01:38 And in the middle of the day, the whole group of gorillas wandered over towards the enclosure
01:44 as if to be let in at night.
01:47 There's also a call for citizen scientists to observe animals, even your own pets.
01:52 This time around, we're going to look at some of the same types of animals.
01:56 So we're going to look at a different group of gorillas and see if they behave the same way as previously.
02:00 We're going to look at another group of giraffe.
02:03 It sounds like a lot of what we know about animal behavior during eclipses is hard to believe.
02:09 And yes, most of it is based on one person's observations of potentially one animal.
02:14 But the only way that we can confirm this stuff is to take every opportunity that we can
02:19 to go out and witness it ourselves.
02:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]