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A bird takes off from the top of a church tower as the moon passes in front of the sun behind it. © Daniel Reinhardt/dpa
When the moon passes in front of the sun on April 8th, people will not only be watching the total solar eclipse. The behavior of animals and plants is also examined.
A total solar eclipse is not just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon devours the sun on April 8, the day will fall into twilight, the temperature will drop - and nature will take notice. There are numerous reports of unusual behavior by animals and plants during an eclipse.
During a solar eclipse in Sweden in 1851, a swarm of ants carrying food froze until the sun reappeared. A Massachusetts pantry was infested with cockroaches shortly after totality in 1932. In 1999, the sap flowed more slowly in a 75-year-old beech tree in Belgium. Tarantulas began tearing down their webs, and North American sand lizards closed their eyes during a solar eclipse in Mexico in 1991.
Many scientists view solar eclipses as a rare opportunity to corroborate anecdotal reports by studying how nature responds - or doesn't - to a few minutes of twilight in the middle of the day. That's why teams from across the country conducted a variety of studies on plant and animal behavior during the last total solar eclipse that occurred over the United States in 2017.
Some of these scientists found that insects, birds, and plants seemed to shift into a near-nocturnal pattern of behavior after the sun disappeared. Case in point: Scientists in several states reported that fireflies began blinking, and a team in Idaho captured two species of voles that are normally active at night.
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Bat researchers in Georgia, however, were not convinced that the eclipse had any effect on behavior, although they did detect slightly more bat activity the night after the eclipse than on the nights before or after it. In South Carolina the beetles were flying around as usual.
How animals behave during a total solar eclipse
It is almost impossible to understand how solar eclipses affect nature in general. That's because solar eclipses don't follow one of the most basic rules of science: replication. They do not occur regularly in the same place. They vary in length. They take place at different times of the day and year.
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“Many of the things we found in the literature were just that - an oddity. It happens once at regular intervals, so it's curious, but not generally meaningful for animal behavior," says Olav Rueppell, a scientist who studies honey bee biology at the University of Alberta in Canada.
While a solar eclipse is a wonderful opportunity to observe nature, there is also a possible observer effect: people who are normally at school, work, or just distracted, look and listen carefully, and what they perceive as reactions Seeing the eclipse could be normal behaviors that they don't notice on a normal day.
Adam Hartstone-Rose, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University, led a study of animal responses to the 2017 solar eclipse at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C. “At any point on Earth, a total solar eclipse occurs only once every 375 years . So it's not like you're learning something now that you can use again in the future, and that's certainly true for animals too," Hartstone-Rose said. “But it is a unifying event. We are all going through this experience together,” he said, adding that during the solar eclipse in April we will all communicate with the animals and reflect on how they experience it.
Studies of animal behavior during a solar eclipse
Studies of animal behavior during a solar eclipse fall into two categories. Some biologists who are near the path of totality are designing a study to see how the eclipse affects their favorite organism, be it honey bees or chimpanzees. Others try to get the public to collect data and make observations along the entire trail, which scientists can then use to identify general patterns.
The NASA-backed Eclipse Soundscapes project, for example, will collect audio data and observations from hundreds of people during the solar eclipse in April to replicate a citizen science study of animal responses to a solar eclipse in 1932, but with a little more rigor. In his team's 2017 study of zoo animals, Hartstone-Rose had researchers systematically observe 17 species, including baboons, flamingos and Galapagos tortoises.
Most responded to the eerie darkness in some way - whether by changing their sleeping habits, behaving fearfully, or mating. Giraffes that had previously eaten lettuce and chewed their cud crouched near their stall or galloped around their enclosure. A Komodo dragon that hadn't moved for a day ran around its enclosure and climbed the wall.
Hartstone-Rose is repeating the observations this year at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas and is calling on more than a thousand volunteers across the country to collect records of the animals' behavior as part of a project called the Solar Eclipse Safari. He is interested not only in the anomalous behavior of animals, but also in how observing animals and attempting to understand their experiences affects people, perhaps expanding their sense of wonder and awe.
What do birds do during a total solar eclipse
A common report is that during a solar eclipse the birds go to sleep and become quiet. But when a team of ornithologists from Cornell University were recording the 1963 solar eclipse along an old logging road near the town of Corinna, Maine, they heard the songs of a goldfinch, a hermit thrush, a mourning thrush and a violet in the middle of totality.
A bird sits on a fence after a partial solar eclipse. © Matias Basualdo/dpa
“Perhaps there are no two lists of birds heard before, during, and after the eclipse that are even remotely similar,” they wrote in their summary of observations.
In the 50 minutes before and after totality in 2017, researchers observing flying insects and birds via the weather radar network noticed that the sky became eerily quiet, but there was an interesting increase in activity right at totality. The researchers speculated that it could be a type of insect reacting to the sudden darkness, while the birds may have become quiet out of confusion.
"Some previous research has shown that insects respond much more immediately to signals of light, while birds are more likely to wonder what's going on," said Cecilia Nilsson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden. “Totality only lasts a few minutes, and by the time you figure it out, it's over. For bird lovers, the many uncontrollable variables of a solar eclipse can also be a scientific opportunity.
An exciting aspect of the 2024 solar eclipse is that it will occur in the spring, while the 2017 North American solar eclipse occurred very early in the fall migration, Nilsson said. Many birds, Nilsson said, migrate at night and are often more motivated during spring migration, so it's possible the sudden darkness may have a different effect this time.
How honey bees behave during totality
Honey bee researcher Rueppell was in North Carolina during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Together with his colleagues, he decided to take a closer look at previous observations of honey bee behavior. A crowdsourced compilation of observations of a total solar eclipse from 1932, for example, included reports of a swarm of 200 bees showing “concern” in the minutes before totality. Another observer reported that “as darkness increased, the number of departing bees decreased and the returning battalions grew larger.”
Rueppell and his colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina used observers to watch the entrances to the hives and count how many honey bees flew out before, during and after totality and how many returned from foraging. They made some hives hungrier than others by depriving the bees of honey before the eclipse to see if this changed their willingness to forage.
The researchers found that the environmental stimuli overrode the bees' internal clocks and the darkness caused them to return to the hive and hole up. These results are consistent with another study that found that bees stopped buzzing around flowers during totality. But hives that were stressed by starvation were less likely to shut down completely than those that weren't stressed.
In a second experiment, researchers pollinated the bees with fluorescent powder, released them from their hives, and then measured how quickly they returned. Just before totality, they noticed that the bees returned more quickly, almost as if they had panicked.
Sage bushes first have to recover from the shock of the sun
Daniel Beverly, a plant ecophysiologist at Indiana University, studied how sage bushes in Wyoming responded during the 2017 solar eclipse. The last time a total solar eclipse passed over Wyoming was in 1918, although it passed through different parts of the state.
“These plants are 60 to 100 years old and have never experienced a midday eclipse like this,” he said. The scientists found that photosynthesis dropped sharply during totality and it took hours to recover from the shock, which the sun induced again minutes later.
This year, Beverly will measure ecological responses to the eclipse in an Indiana forest, part of a long-term project to monitor the flow of carbon, water and energy through the ecosystem. Because Morgan-Monroe State Forest is already the subject of intensive scientific study, scientists can draw on existing instruments to measure factors such as carbon flow and water movement in white oaks, tulip poplars, sassafras and sugar maples.
Beverly looks forward to automating data collection as much as possible so that he and his team can fully enjoy the brief but miraculous moment of totality. “It’s pretty overwhelming and life-changing,” Beverly said. “Just the spectacle it offers. I don’t know what it does to the human brain.”
About the author
Carolyn Johnson
is a science reporter. She previously covered health care and health care affordability for consumers.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 26, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.