On April 8, 2024, when the moon passes between the Earth and sun, the resulting solar eclipse will darken skies to a dim twilight for 5 minutes across a wide swath of North America. Most necks will be craned toward the celestial spectacle, but if you look around you may witness something just as captivating: a bunch of baffled creatures trying to make sense of the unexpected gloom.
For many of them, life revolves around solar patterns. As the daily cycles of light and dark change with the seasons, they look upward for their cues on when to wake, when to eat, when to sleep, when to reproduce. But when their guiding light is suddenly extinguished, as during a solar eclipse, they become disoriented.
“Puzzled animals that are active during the day head back to their nighttime abodes,” writes animal behavior researcher Steve Portugal in an article in The Conversation, “while nocturnal animals think they’ve overslept.” And since any given spot on Earth only sees an eclipse every few hundred years, each one is a first and last for those who live through it.
Eclipses Through the Ages
For centuries, anecdotal accounts have pointed to a connection between these cosmic phenomena and bizarre animal behavior. One of the first comes from an Italian monk named Restoro d'Arezzo, who observed an eclipse in 1239.
