The monkeys at the San Diego Zoo were "howling up a storm" two days before Monday's Los Angeles earthquake. They had diarrhea. They were agitated. Something very strange was up, their keeper noted in her log.
Soon after 4: 31 a.m. Monday, it was the scientists who were scratching their heads.
Could it be that the animals knew something that has eluded researchers through the centuries? Or was it just another coincidence?
Unfortunately for the residents of southern California and other temblor-prone regions, the science of earthquake prediction lags far behind even weather forecasting. And there's little reason to suspect it'll get much better soon.
Weather forecasters "can see it on satellites, they can send planes into it, they can see it coming from the West," says John Filson, of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Seismologists are "trying to pick up what's going on 10, 20 or 30 miles down by standing on the surface. We can't look down there."
Not only was it not predicted, but scientists with the USGS and the quake center at the California Institute of Technology say they didn't even know which fault was at fault.
Early Monday, it appeared a previously uncharted fault had given way. But by evening, the experts suspected it was one of three already known - the Devonshire fault, Frew fault, or a portion of the Santa Monica Mountains thrust system, according to Kerry Sieh, a CalTech geologist.
There was some mystery to the pattern of this one, and they didn't see it coming. But no one was suggesting they were caught truly off-guard.
"We've learned not to be surprised by earthquakes in southern California," said Jim Mori, a USGS seismologist.
But what about the monkeys? And hasn't there been a recent series of relatively minor quakes nearby?
"For a long time, we had an "800" number in northern California for people to call if their animals were acting strange and they thought it was because a quake was coming," Filson said.
Mostly, they got calls from people after the quakes. "With the ones before quakes, we were never able to find any statistical correlation" that would lead to a prediction, he said.
As for some recent rumbles that a novice might see as a precursor to a major quake, the scientists said there was no indication the "Santa Monica Swarm" was related to Monday's events.
As for the monkeys - Schmidt's guenons, to be precise - they were settling back to normal Monday after the shake-up. And keeper Rochelle Rogers said she wasn't drawing any firm conclusions.
"To me, it was just kind of anecdotal," she said. Contributing: Jack Williams and Vic Pollard.
