How animals act during an eclipse
On April 8th a total solar eclipse with pass over a good part of the country and the Buckeye State, and for many, this will be the first and only time we see a total solar eclipse in our lifetime.
While we humans will be plenty excited to experience total darkness in the middle of the afternoon, the routines and behaviors of wildlife will be a bit thrown off.
"Birds may stop tweeting, and some of the other animals may go into their night cycle. So you might hear crickets as the solar eclipse happens, and you'll see the stars, it's pretty amazing that something like that happens in the middle of the afternoon," says Jason Fallon with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
It's not just the wildlife, animals in zoos will also show off interesting behaviors.
Carrie Bassett of the Akron Zoo says a study was done in 2017 at the Riverbank Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina to study zoo animals' behaviors during totality.
"They actually caught the Galapagos tortoise looking up at the sky, maybe trying to figure out why it's dark or something. A lot of their animals showed behaviors relating to the fact that they thought it was nighttime and it was time to go to bed or it was time to get dinner so they were trying to go to their inside areas, I know their Kamodo dragons were one of them," says Bassett.
The Akron Zoo says, that due to it being April in Ohio, some of its animals will remain indoors, but the Zoo will be studying the reactions of animals like flamingos, different cat species, and even grizzly bears.
The Zoo adds if you're planning to go to the Zoo for the eclipse, download an app called Eclipse Sound Scapes to report what animal reactions you're observing. ODNR adds wherever you are in Ohio, they'll need the public's help doing something similar.
"Our division of wildlife is asking for people to download something called Inaturalist, and what it is, it's kind of an app on your phone and we are asking for people to watch the behaviors of animals and report them. Because this doesn't happen very often it's a great time for us to learn these behaviors," says Fallon.
Information on Eclipse Sound Scapes can be found here: https://eclipsesoundscapes.org/
Information about INaturalist can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/
