Animals During Eclipses

As we have talked about the General Theory of Relativity, the significance of the solar eclipse has come up since it gave accuracy to Einstein's theory. Professor Wheeler spoke about witnessing the total solar eclipse a couple of years ago the strange behavior of animals that occurred at the point of totality. I had previously heard of some of the weird things animals do during these types of episodes, but my interest was renewed recently so I decided to look into it more

Different animals have different reactions to the eclipse. As mentioned in class, crickets will come out and start chirping as if it is nighttime once the moon blocks the sun. Also, bees stop their buzzing, cows stop their grazing, and all return to their respective dwellings en masse. Other creatures, such as spiders, will take down their webs as they would normally do at night, only to come to the sad realization that they must reconstruct them again without a night's rest minutes later. And while more intelligent animals are aware that this occurrence is a fluke, other animals genuinely perceive it is as being night and change their behavior accordingly. In the back of my mind I know animals' sense of time is very different from humans', but it is particularly intriguing how in-tune animals necessarily are with the natural universe and how much we have removed ourselves thanks to our brains and inventions.

One article I read indicated how hard it is to empirically gather data on animal behavior during eclipses. Most evidence comes from anecdotal evidence, perhaps because people are too busy looking at the sky to do research.. (a joke). However, science, in staying true to inductive reasoning, hopes to gather more accurate data through the power of collaboration. Scientists have developed an app which allows users to document their observations of animals during eclipses in order to identify clear patterns of animal behavior. As of today, it is hard to obtain concrete, scientific evidence for these phenomena. More research into this study is one aspect of technology that would be interesting to follow going into the future.