Science

How do we not already know?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

While there are many individual sightings of critters behaving bizarrely during historic eclipses, only in recent years have scientists started to rigorously study the altered behaviors of wild, domestic and zoo animals.

Seven years ago, Galapagos tortoises at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, “that generally do absolutely nothing all day … during the peak of the eclipse, they all started breeding,” said Hartstone-Rose.

In April, Hartstone-Rose’s team plans to study similar species in Texas to see if the behaviors they witnessed before in South Carolina point to larger patterns.

This year’s full solar eclipse in North America crisscrosses a different route than in 2017 and occurs in a different season, giving researchers and citizen scientists opportunities to observe new habits.

“During a solar eclipse, there’s a conflict between their internal rhythms and external environment,” said University of Alberta’s Olav Rueppell, adding that bees rely on polarized light from the sun to navigate.

As for indoor pets, they may react as much to what their owners are doing – whether they’re excited or nonchalant about the eclipse – as to any changes in the sky, said University of Arkansas animal researcher Raffaela Lesch.

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There's also Eclipse Soundscapes, a citizen-science project by NASA.