Achi news desk-
When millions tilt their heads skyward to watch Monday’s solar eclipse, Chelsea Paquette will instead be watching a pair of Asiatic Himalayan Black Bears.
Paquette is a conservation coordinator at the Granby Zoo outside Montreal and is involved in a study on how animals react to an eclipse.
She doesn’t expect much from the bears.
“They’re slower moving animals, that’s for sure,” Paquette said. “They are also nocturnal, so we expect them to spend a lot of time sleeping.”
The zoo has chosen 12 species as part of the study. There are a total of 50 animals. Among them are Red Pandas, snow leopards, zebras and ostriches.
The study was presented by a local astronomer, Pierre Chastenay. He will watch the zoo’s community of 13 Japanese Macaque monkeys.
“They are very social animals,” Chastenay said.
“So it will be interesting to look at their social interactions during the eclipse.”
This will be Chastenay’s fourth eclipse. He has traveled as far away as Australia to witness the rare celestial phenomenon. But the path of totality of Monday’s eclipse runs right over Chastenay’s home, and the nearby zoo.
He says he tried to research animal behavior during an eclipse but found very little, so the zoo offered to conduct its own study.
“It will get really dark, like 30 to 45 minutes after sunset,” he said. “The temperature will drop. The wind will rise. So all these phenomena will influence the behavior of the animals. “
The teams have already been studying the animals. They have spent three hours on two days watching their normal behaviour. They will also do the same two days after the eclipse. That will give them a baseline to determine if the reaction during the eclipse is different from how they would normally act.
Over the hours they watch, the researchers input each animal’s actions into an app every minute.
Breaking news from Canada and around the world sent to your email, as it happens.
Paquette’s bears have not been busy.
“I’ve definitely tackled the behavior of ‘chilling it’ and ‘sleeping’ a lot,” he said.
The Granby Zoo works in conjunction with the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas.
Dr Adam Hartstone-Rose is a professor of biological sciences at North Caroline State University in Raleigh. He works with graduate students to observe animals in Fort Worth.
Hartstone-Rose conducted a similar study during the 2017 eclipse.
In that study, his team watched 17 animals and found that about three-quarters appeared to have a distinctive reaction.
He says the majority of animals have shown signs of a circadian response. The darkness seemed to make them act as if it were night. Some went to their enclosures at night or to their feeding areas. Several animals also appeared to show signs of anxiety.
“The only time I’ve seen giraffes run is when they’re startled by a predator or a vehicle or something like that,” Hartstone-Rose said.
“And yet, in 2017, we saw the giraffe in the zoo start to gallop. I mean, it was amazing. “
Another animal that reacted strongly was the zoo’s Komodo Dragon, the world’s largest lizard. He had not moved in the previous two days, but when the eclipse began, he ran around and climbed the walls of his enclosure.
Before that, Hartstone-Rose says he thought he might be dead, and didn’t expect him to move.
“I mean, it literally could have been a mountain of taxidermy. I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced he was still alive until totality.”
The rarity of an eclipse makes it difficult to study everything about it.
Hartstone-Rose says there are more scientific studies about Sasquatch than there are about animal behavior during an eclipse. He hopes to at least narrow the gap with the results of this project.
And if he’s busy while millions of other people are staring at the sky, he won’t complain.
“I find the behavior of the animals even more interesting than what happens with the sun,” he said.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
