Where Are All the Dead Animals?

“Giant waves washed floodwaters up to 2 miles inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards…

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.” (Yahoo! News)

Explanations invoke the often-noticed ability of animals to sense danger. At first blush, you don’t need to invoke a ‘sixth sense’ here; it is easy to imagine animals’ alarm when the earth moves beneath their feet in an earthquake. But what would lead them to expect a tidal wave and move to higher ground? Certainly it could not be accounted for on the basis of natural selection, as such a disaster does not happen frequently enough to exert selective pressure. There are more things in heaven and earth…