☽ Totality for Nature ☾
The solar eclipse event that happened on August 21st 2017 was broadcasted live all over the world and what a sight it was! Space fanatics or just plain curious, people tuned in to NASA’s website and other live telescope broadcastings for the most exciting phenomenon of the year.

As someone who is usually excited about these sightings (as well as meteor showers and regular stargazing), I want to share with you all a little more about why solar eclipses are so significant for the scientific community and why biologists plan months ahead to prepare for one.
A solar eclipse is not just about a few minutes of totality and darkness and cheers from the public below before they go about their daily business;
For the biologists, there are some interesting things we are curious to study in the behaviour of plants and animals during a solar eclipse. As you know, most living beings follow a circadian rhythm (i.e a 24 hour cycle). And for some animals, they might show erratic behaviour when their cycle has been disrupted.
Here are some lesser known rhythms:
diurnal rhythms: the circadian rhythm synced with day and night
ultradian rhythms: shorter biological rhythms with a higher frequency than circadian rhythms (i.e a recurrent period or cycle repeated throughout a 24-hour day)
infradian rhythms: biological rhythms that last more than 24 hours, such as a menstrual cycle
So far, more than 500 people using the iNaturalist app have made about 2,100 observations involving about 350 different species during the solar eclipse 2 days ago.
— Rebecca Johnson, citizen science research director at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
These are some of the interesting (others called it weird) behavioural changes observed during solar eclipses, followed by some of my thoughts:
“At least one type of orb-weaving spider has been seen to begin disassembling its webs at the start of the totality, as if it were the end of the day, according to one study. Orb weavers typically destroy their webs and rebuild new ones each morning — they started rebuilding when the sun came back out.”
— Kevin Loria, Business Insider US
You might be wondering why spiders disassemble their webs at night and rebuild new ones every morning. It’s akin to fishermen and their fishing nets. They mend their nets regularly, making sure holes are covered up so that they can continue to catch a bountiful supply of fish every day. So in the case of spiders, the daily wear and tear from catching insects prompt them to eat their old webs and respin new ones every morning, not wasting any silk as it’s a really valuable resource. There are different types of behaviour in animals but I would say this was an example of an innate response to the absence and presence of light.
Some scientists have said they’ve seen dolphins and whales rising to the surface in groups at the beginning of a total solar eclipse. “The smarter animals freak out,” Douglas Duncan, director of the University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium, told Time.
I hope they were more curious about it than freaked out, monkeys were also observed to stop what they were doing and climb to the treetops to watch the spectacular event unfold and then when the show was over, went back to their business.
I couldn’t be everywhere at once to film, but I’m told the lorikeets and flamingos flocked together, the giraffes swayed back and forth, the Komodo dragon ran across its enclosure and a baboon spun in circles. All of these behaviours will make for great scientific research.
— Adam Hartstone-Rose, Riverbanks Zoo
Fascinating! I’m aware that there hasn’t been much research done on such animal behaviour, but because a natural phenomenon like this can actually garner quite a lot of data for us to study animal intelligence and whether animals are aware that it is an inconsistent occurrence (such as primates, domesticated cats and dogs), or do they blindly follow the changes (in the case of insects), OR they do not even know it’s happening (like... cows), I am quite interested to read more of this research in future. Fortunately for us, the next total eclipse will come on July 2, 2019 in the US. I will have just graduated by then (hopefully), so perhaps I could buy a plane ticket to North America just for the spectacle! And maybe to observe the behaviour of fellow Homo sapiens during totality.